





ait 


PW a4 = 

%. 

a ae - ‘ * 

PRS EP aes 

“ ee te 
ene ly Fch eo 

Sonne 





« 


THE LIBRARY OF 


REVEREND HARRY M. NORTH 


GRADUATE OF THE CLASS OF 1899 
TRUSTEE 1919-1932 


DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
DURHAM, N. C. 








\\ 





THE 


CHARACTER OF JESUS 


FORBIDDING HIS 
POSSIBLE CLASSIFICATION WITH MEN. 


BY 


HORACE BUSHNELL. 


NEW YORK : 
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS. 
1906 


MG hae 


~ 





Tn the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the 
sor the Southern District of Ni 





D mmr c-h. R. 


PUBLISHER'S ADVERTISEMENT, 


In this little volume we reprint, with consent of 
the Author, the tenth chapter of his Treatise, Na- 
TURE AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 

This chapter, taken as a sketch of the self-evidenc- 
ing, superhuman character of Christ, has attracted 
much attention ; and we have been solicited, many 
times over, in the various notices and reviews of the 
book, as well as by private readers, to give it to the 
public by itself. This, too, we do the more readily, 
that it makes a complete whole by itself, and is in 
a style to be read by multitudes who probably will 
not undertake to master the more elaborate and 
difficult argument, of which it is only a subordinate 


member. 


2477596 


PS. mi, wea. Tere tye 






Digitized by the Inter 
in 2022 with fund 
Duke University Lit 

4 


https://archive.org/details/characterofjesu: 


CONTENTS. 





We assume nothing reported of him to be true, 5 
The only character that has aperfect youth,. . . 


The picture stands by itself, . A 6 5 9 e 
The absurd pictures given of infant prodigies, . . 


Jesus the only great character that holds a footing of innocence, 





The only religious character that disowns repentance, 


He unites characters difficult to be united, . é, A 
The astonishing pretensions of Jesus, . oleae . 
His pretensions enter also into his actions, . a ihe 
Nobody offended by these pretensions, . S liner) 
What mere man could support such pretensions? , 


Peculiar in the passive virtues, . = . . 
Does not falter in the common trials of exinence! . 

His passion, no mere human martyrdom, . 
His agony misplaced, taken as being only a man’ A . 

It is, humanly speaking, excessive, . 3 . ° . 
The pathology is divine, . 
His defence before Pilate, all that could be made, seals 





He undertakes what is humanly impossible, AO 
He assumes to set up the kingdom of God among men, 
His plan covers ages of time, . = . ay ee 
Such attempts not human, CF age Nate Sp Bem te ne 


He takes rank with the humblest orders of society, - 
No great secial architect ever saw the wisdom of it, . 





247796 


6 CONTENTS. 


And still he raises no partisan feeling, . 
No human leader in this, . . . 


Origina\ and independent as no man is, 
Teaches by no human method, . » 
Warped by no desire to gain assent, . 


Comprehensive, under no human conditions, 


Could not Hold a one-sided view, . . 
Clear of all the current superstitions, 
But no liberalist, < . P ~ ° 
His simplicity is perfect, . . ° 
Shining as pure light, P . * 


Adequately teaches God even to the humble, 


This morality is not artistic, . s . 
But intuitive and original, . 2 . 
Never anxious for success, . . . 


Raised and made sacred by familiarity, 
Our experience of men reversed in him, 


Recapitulation, . ~ Fy F = 


Did such a being actually exist? .  . 
Was he a sinless character ? . 
Mr. Parker’s estimate of him, ° . 
Mr. Hennel’s estimate, ‘ s Fy 
Faults charged, . : < ° . ° 
Faults supposed and intimated, . 
His invective against the Pharisees, . 
Milton’s right of invective, - = 
The fact of his miracles inferred, . . 
His errand is order itself, . . . 
No disrnption of laworsystem, . . 
The mythical hypothesis impossible, 
Their success Mr. Parker concedes, e 
The miracles are in place in a gospel, 


. 


Miracles rejected, so is Jesus the Grand Miracle, 
Jesus himself the all-sufficient evidence, 


PAGE 


Sa 


PSVSSASAIARSAFSSSEIR B BS KFCHEAKRARESS 


THE 
Wir kACTER, OF JESUS. 


Ir is the grand peculiarity of the sacred writings, 
that they deal in supernatural events and transac- 
tions, and show the fact of a celestial institution 
finally erected on earth, which is fitly called the 
kingdom of God ; because it shows Him reigning, 
as a Regenerator and Restorer of the broken order 
of the world. Christianity is, in this view, no mere 
scheme of doctrine, or of ethical practice, but is in- 
stead a kind of miracle, a power out of nature and 
above, descending into it; a historically supernat- 
ural movement on the world, that is visibly entered 
into it, and organized to be an institution in the 
person of Jesus Christ. He, therefore, is the central 
figure and power, and with him the entire fabric 
either stands or falls. 

To this central figure, then, we now turn our- 
selves ; and, as no proof beside the light is neces- 
sary to show that the sun shines, so we shall find 
that Jesus proves himself by his own self-evidence. 
The simple inspection of his life and character will 
suffice to show that he cannot be classified with 
mankind (man though he be), any more than what 
we call his miracles can be classified with mere nat- 

(7) 


8 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


ural events. The simple demonstrations of his life 
and spirit are the sufficient attestation of his own 
profession, when he says—“ I am from above ”—“I 
came down from heaven.” 

Let us not be misunderstood. We do not assume 
the truth of the narrative by which the manner and 

We assume facts of the life of Jesus are reported 
nothing Tepott- to us; for this, by the supposition, is 
cae the matter in question. We only as- 
sume the representations themselves, as being just 
what they are, and discover their necessary truth, 
in the transcendent, wondrously self-evident, pic- 
ture of divine excellence and beauty exhibited in 
them. We take up the account of Christ, in the 
New Testament, just as we would any other ancient 
writing, or as if it were a manuscript just brought 
to light in some ancient library. We open the 
book, and discover in it four biographies of a cer- 
tain remarkable character, called Jesus Christ. He 
is miraculously born of Mary, a virgin of Galilee, 
and declares himself, without scruple, that he came 
out from God. Finding the supposed history made 
up, in great part, of his mighty acts, and not being 
disposed to believe in miracles and marvels, we 
should soon dismiss the book as a tissue of absurd- 
ities too extravagant for belief, were we not struck 
with the sense of something very peculiar in the 
character of this remarkable person. Having our 
attention arrested thus by the impression made on 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 9 


our respect, we are put on inquiry, and the more 
we study it, the more wonderful, as a character, it 
appears. And before we have done, it becomes, 
in fact, the chief wonder of the story; lifting all 
the other wonders into order and intelligent pro- 
portion round it, and making one compact and 
glorious wonder of the whole picture; a picture 
shining in its own clear sunlight upon us, as the 
truest of all truths—Jesus, the Divine Word, com- 
ing out from God, to be incarnate with us, and be 
the vehicle of God and salvation to the race. — 

On the single question, therefore, of the more 
than human character of Jesus, we propose, in per- 
fect confidence, to rest a principal argument for 
Christianity as a supernatural institution ; for, if 
there be in Jesus a character which is not human, 
then has something broken into the world that is 
not of it, and the spell of unbelief is broken. 

Not that Christianity might not be a supernatural 
institution, if Jesus were only a man; for many 
prophets and holy men, as we believe, have brought 
forth to the world communications that are not 
from themselves, but were received by inspirations 
from God. There are several grades, too, of the 
supernatural, as already intimated ; the supernat- 
ural human, the supernatural prophetic, the super- 
natural demonic and angelic, the supernatural divine. 
Christ, we shall see, is the supernatural manifested 
in the highest grade or order ; viz., the divine. 


10 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


We observe, then, as a first peculiarity at the root 
of his character, that he begins life with a perfect 
youth. His childhood is an unspotted, 

chon er (RY and, withal, a kind of celestial flower. 
Se perfect ‘The notion of a superhuman or celestial 
childhood, the most difficult of all 

things to be conceived, is yet successfully drawn 
by a few simple touches. He is announced before- 
hand as “that Holy Thing”; a beautiful and 
powerful stroke, to raise our expectation to the 
level of a nature so mysterious. In his childhood, 
everybody loves him. Using words of external 
description, he is shown growing up in favor with 
God and man, a child so lovely and beautiful, that 
heaven and earth appear to smile upon him to- 
gether. So, when it is added that the child grew 
and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom, and, 
more than all, that the grace or beautifying power 
of God was upon him, we look, as on the unfolding 
of a sacred flower, and seem to scent a fragrance 
wafted on us from other worlds. Then, at the age 
of twelve, he is found among the great learned men 
of the day, the doctors of the temple, hearing what 
they say, and asking them questions. And this, 
without any word that indicates forwardness or 
pertness in the child’s manner, such as some Chris- 
tian Rabbi, or silly and credulous devotee, would 
certainly have added. The doctors are not offend- 
ed, as by a child too forward or wanting in modesty; 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 11 


they are only amazed that such a degree of under- 
standing can dwell in one so young and simple. 
His mother finds him there among them, and be- 
gins to expostulate with him. His reply is very 
strange ; it must, she is sure, have some deep mean- 
ing that corresponds with his mysterious birth, and 
the sense he has ever given her of a something 
strangely peculiar in his ways; and she goes home 
keeping his saying in her heart, and guessing vainly 
what his thought may be. Mysterious, holy secret! 
which this mother hides in her bosom; that her 
holy thing, her child whom she has watched, during 
the twelve years of his celestial childhood, now be- 
gins to speak of being “about his Father’s busi- 
ness,” in words of dark enigma, which she can not 
fathom. ~ 

Now we do not say, observe, that there is one 
word of truth in these touches of narrative. We 
only say that, whether they be fact or Piet ee 
fiction, here is given the sketch of a stands by it- 
perfect and sacred childhood, not of a aA 
simple, lovely, ingenuous, and properly human 
childhood, such as the poets love to sketch, but of 
a sacred and celestial childhood. In this respect, 
the early character of Jesus is a picture that stands 
by itself. In no other case, that we remember, has 
it ever entered the mind of a biographer, in drawing 
a character, to represent it as beginning with a spot- 
less childhood. The childhood of the great human 


12 CHARACTER OF JESUB. 


characters, if given at all, is commonly represented, 
according to the uniform truth, as being more or 
less contrary to the manner of their mature age ; 
and never as being strictly one with it, except in 
those cases of inferior eminence where the kind of 
distinction attained to is that of some mere prod- 
igy, and not a character of greatness in action, or 
of moral excellence. In all the higher ranges of 
character, the excellence portrayed is never the 
simple unfolding of a harmonious and perfect 
beauty contained in the germ of childhood, but it 
is a character formed by a process of rectification, 
in which many follies are mended and distempers 
removed ; in which confidence is checked by defeat, 
passion moderated by reason, smartness sobered by 
experience. Commonly a certain pleasure is taken 
in showing how the many wayward sallies of the 
boy are, at length, reduced by discipline to the 
character of wisdom, justice, and public heroism, 
so much admired. 

Besides, if any writer, of almost any age, will 
undertake to describe, not merely a spotless, but a 
superhuman or celestial childhood, not haying the 
reality before him, he must be somewhat more than 
human himself, if he does not pile together a mass 
of clumsy exaggerations, and draw and overdraw, 
till neither ae nor —_ can find any verisimil- 
itude in the picture. 

Neither let us omit to notice what ideas the Rab- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 13 


bis and learned doctors of this age were able, in 
fact, to furnish, when setting forth a 

remarkable childhood. Thus Josephus, Ape ee: 
drawing on the teachings of the Rabbis, a ae 
tells how the infant Moses, when the king of Egypt 
took him out of his daughter’s arms, and playfully 
put the diadem on his head, threw it pettishly down 
and stamped on it. And when Moses was three 
years old, he tells us that the child had grown so 
tall, and exhibited such a wonderful beauty of 
countenance, that people were obliged, as it were, 
to stop and look at him as he was carried along the 
road, and were held fast by the wonder, gazing till 
he was out of sight. See, too, what work is made 
of the childhood of Jesus himself, in the Apocry- 
phal gospels. These are written by men of so 
nearly the same era, that we may discover, in their 
embellishments, what kind of a childhood it was in 
the mere invention of the time to make out. While 
the gospels explicitly say that Jesus wrought no 
miracles till his public ministry began, and that he 
made his beginning in the miracle of Cana, these 
are ambitious to make him a great prodigy in his 
childhood. They tell how, on one occasion, he pur- 
sued in his anger, the other children, who refused 
to play with him, and turned them into kids ; how, 
on another, when a child accidentally ran against 
him, he was angry, and killed him by his mere 
word ; how, on another, Jesus had a dispute with 


14 OHARACTER OF JESUS. 


his teacher over the alphabet, and when the teacher 
struck him, how he crushed him, withered his arm, 
and threw him down dead. Finally, Joseph tells 
Mary that they must keep him within doors, for 
everybody perishes against whom he is excited. 
His mother sends him to the well for water, and 
having broken his pitcher, he brings the water in 
his cloak. He goes into a dyer’s shop, when the 
dyer is out, and throws all the cloths he finds into 
a vat of one color ; but, when they are taken out, be- 
hold, they are all dyed of the precise color that was 
ordered. He commands a palm-tree to stoop down 
and let him pluck the fruit, and it obeys. When 
he is carried down into Egypt, all the idols fall 
down wherever he passes, and the lions and leopards 
gather round him in aharmless company. This the 
Gospel of the Infancy gives, as a picture of the 
wonderful childhood of Jesus.) How unlike that 
holy flower of paradise, in the true gospels, which a 
few simple touches make to bloom in beautiful self- 
evidence before us! 





Passing now to the character of Jesus in his ma- 
turity, we discover, at once, that there is an element 
edesustheonly = it which distinguishes it from all 
area olieatson, Human characters, viz., innocence. By 
ingofinnocence. this we mean, not that he is actually 
sinless ; that will be denied, and, therefore, must 


not here be assumed, We mean that, viewed ex- 


OHARAOTER OF JESUS. 15 


ternally, he is a perfectly harmless being, actuated 
by no destructive passions, gentle to inferiors, doing 
ill or injury to none. The figure of a Lamb, which 
never was, or could be applied to any of the great 
human characters, without an implication of weak- 
ness fatal to all respect, is yet, with no such effect, 
applied to him. We associate weakness with inno- 
cence, and the association is so powerful, that no 
human writer would undertake to sketch a great 
character on the basis of innocence, or would even 
think it possible. We predicate innocence of in- 
fancy ; but to be a perfectly harmless, guileless 
man, never doing ill even for a moment, we consider 
to be the same as to be a man destitute of spirit and 
manly force. But Christ accomplished the impossi- 
ble. Appearing in all the grandeur and majesty of 
a superhuman manhood, he is able still to unite the 
impression of innocence, with no apparent diminu- 
tion of his sublimity. It is, in fact, the distinctive 
glory of his character, that it seems to be the natu- 
ral unfolding of a divine innocence ; a pure celes- 
tial childhood, amplified by growth. We feel the 
power of this strange combination, but we have so 
great difficulty in conceiving it, or holding our 
minds to the conception, that we sometimes subside 
or descend to the human level, and empty the char- 
acter of Jesus of the strange element unawares. 
We read, for example, his terrible denunciations 
against the Pharisees, and are shocked by the vio- 


ty 


16 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


lent, fierce sound they have on our mortal lips ; not 
perceiving that the offence is in us, and not in him. 
We should suffer no such revulsion, did we only 
conceive them bursting out, as words of indignant 
grief, from the surcharged bosom of innocence ; for 
there is nothing so bitter as the offence that inno- 
cence feels, when stung by hypocrisy and a sense 
of cruelty to the poor. So, when he drives the 
money-changers from the temple, we are likely to 
leave out the only element that saves him from a 
look of violence and passion. Whereas, it is the 
very point of the story, not that he, as by mere 
force, can drive so many men, but that so many are 
seen retiring before the moral power of one, a 
mysterious being, in whose face and form the in- 
dignant flush of innocence reveals a tremendous 
feeling, they can no wise comprehend, much less 
are able to resist. 

Accustomed to no such demonstrations of vigor 
and decision in the innocent human characters, and 
having it as our way to set them down contemptu- 
ously, without further consideration, as 


“ Incapable and shallow innocents,’”’— 


we turn the indignant fire of Jesus into a fire of 
malignity ; whereas, it should rather be conceived 
that Jesus here reveals his divinity, by what so pow- 
erfully distinguishes God himself, when he clothes 
his goodness in the tempests and thunders of na- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 17 


ture. Decisive, great, and strong, Christ is yet all 
this, even the more sublimely, that he is invested, 
withal, in the lovely, but humanly feeble garb of 
innocence. And that this is the true conception, is 
clear, in the fact that no one ever thinks of him as 
weak, and no one fails to be somehow impressed 
with a sense of innocence by his life. When his 
enemies are called to show what evil or harm he 
hath done, they can specify nothing, save that he 
has offended their bigotry. Even Pilate, when he 
gives him up, confesses that he finds nothing in him 
to blame, and, shuddering with apprehensions he 
cannot subdue, washes his hands to be clear of the 
innocent blood! Thus he dies, a being holy, harm- ' 
less, undefiled. And when he hangs, a bruised 
flower, drooping on his cross, and the sun above is 
dark, and the earth beneath shudders with pain, 
what have we in this funeral grief of the worlds, 
but a fit honor paid to the sad majesty of his divine 
innocence ? 





We pass now to his religious character, which, we 
shali discover, has the remarkable distinction that 
it proceeds from a point exactly opposite to that 
which is the root or radical element in yy. ony re 
the religious character of men. Human ligious character 
piety begins with repentance. Itis the Pentance. 
effort of a being, implicated in wrong and writhing un- 
der the stings of guilt,to come unto God, The most 


Fe 


18 CHARAOTER OF JESUS. 


righteous, or even self-righteous men, blend expres- 
sions of sorrow and vows of new obedience with their 
exercises. But Christ, in the character given him, 
never acknowledges sin. It is the grand peculiarity 
of his piety that he never regrets anything that he 
has done or been ; expresses, nowhere, a single 
feeling of compunction, or the least sense of un- 
worthiness. On the contrary, he boldly challenges 
his accusers, in the question—Which of you con- 
vinceth me of sin? and even declares, at the close 
of his life, in a solemn appeal to God, that he has 
given to men, unsullied, the glory divine that was 
deposited in him. 

Now the question is not whether Christ was, in 
fact, the faultless being, assumed in his religious 
character. All we have to notice here is, that he 
makes the assumption, makes it not only in words, 
but in the very tenor of his exercises themselves, 
and that by this fact his piety is radically distin- 
guished from all human piety. And no mere hu- 
man creature, it is certain, could hold such a relig- 
ious attitude, without shortly displaying faults that 
would cover him with derision, or excesses and de- 
linquencies that would even disgust his friends. 
Piety without one dash of repentance, one ingenu- 
ous confession of wrong, one tear, one look of con- 
trition, one request to heaven for pardon—let any one 
of mankind try this kind of piety, and see how long 
it will be ere his righteousness will prove itself to be 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 19 


the most impudent conceit! how long before his 
passions sobered by no contrition, his pride kept 
down by no repentance, will tempt him into absurdi- 
ties that will turn his pretenses to mockery! No 
sooner does any one of us begin to be self-right- 
eous, than he begins to fall into outward sins that 
shame his conceit. But, in the case of Jesus, no 
such disaster follows. Beginning with an impeni- 
tent or unrepentant piety, he holds it to the end, 
and brings no visible stain upon it. 

Now, one of two things must be true. He was 
either sinless, or he was not. If sinless, what 
greater, more palpable exception to the law of 
human development, than that a perfect and stain- 
less being has for once lived in the flesh! If not, 
which is the supposition required of those who 
deny every thing above the range of human de- 
velopment, then we have a man taking up a re- 
ligion without repentance, a religion not human, 
but celestial, a style of piety never taught him in 
his childhood, and never conceived or attempted 
among men: more than this, a style of piety, withal, 
wholly unsuited to his real character as a sinner, 
holding it as a figment of insufferable presumption 
to the end of life, and that in a way of such un- 
faltering grace and beauty, as to command the uni- 
versal homage of the human race! Could there be 
a wider deviation from all we know of mere human 
development ? 


20 OHARACTER OF JESUS. 


He was also able perfectly to unite elements of 
character, that others find the greatest difficulty in 

He unites Uniting, however unevenly and partial- 
characters dif’ Jy. He is never said to have laughed, 
fester: and yet he never produces the impres- 
sion of austerity, moroseness, sadness, or even of 
being unhappy. On the contrary, he is described 
as one that appears to be commonly filled with a 
sacred joy ; “rejoicing in spirit,” and leaving to his 
disciples, in the hour of his departure, the bequest 
of his joy—“ that they might have my joy fulfilled 
in themselves.” We could not long endure a hu- 
man being whose face was never moved by laugh- 
ter, or relaxed by humorous play. What sympathy 
could we have with one who appears, in this manner, 
to have no human heart? We could not even trust 
him. And yet we have sympathy with Christ ; for 
there is somewhere in him an ocean of deep joy, 
and we see that he is, in fact, only burdened with 
his sympathy for us to such a degree, that his 
mighty life is overcast and oppressed by the charge 
he has undertaken. His lot is the lot of privation ; 
he has no powerful friends ; he has not even where 
to lay his head. No human being could appear in 
such a guise, without occupying us much with the 
sense of his affliction. We should be descending to 
him, as it were, in pity. But we never pity Christ, 
never think of him as struggling with the disad- 
vantages of a lower level, to surmount them, In 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 21 


fact, he does not allow us, after all, to think much 
of his privations. We think of him more as a being 
of mighty resources, proving himself only the more 
sublimely, that he is in the guise of destitution. He 
is the most unworldly of beings, having no desire at 
all for what the earth can give, too great to be caught 
with any longing for its benefits, impassible even to 
its charms, and yet there is no ascetic sourness or 
repugnance, no misanthropic distaste in his man- 
ner ; as if he were bracing himself against the world 
to keep it off. The more closely he is drawn to other 
worlds, the more fresh and susceptible is he to the 
humanities of this. The little child is an image of 
gladness, which his heart leaps forth to embrace. 
The wedding and the feast and the funeral have all 
their cord of sympathy in his bosom. At the wed- 
ding he is clothed in congratulation, at the feast in 
doctrine, at the funeral in tears ; but no miser was 
ever drawn to his money, with a stronger desire, 
than he to worlds above the world. 

Men undertake to be spiritual, and they become 
ascetic ; or, endeavoring to hold a liberal view of 
the comforts and pleasures of society, they are soon 
buried in the world, and slaves to its fashions ; or, 
holding a scrupulous watch to keep out every par- 
ticular sin, they become legal, and fall out of lib- 
erty ; or, charmed with the noble and heavenly lib- 
erty, they run to negligence and irresponsible living ; 
so the earnest become violent, the fervent fanatical 


22 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


and censorious, the gentle waver, the firm turn big- 
ots, the liberal grow lax, the benevolent ostentatious. 
Poor human infirmity can hold nothing steady. 
Where the pivot of righteousness is broken, the 
scales must needs slide off their balance. Indeed, 
it is one of the most difficult things which a cultiva- 
ted Christian can attempt, only to sketch a theoretic 
view of character, in its true justness and proportion, 
so that a little more study, or a little more self-ex- 
perience, will not require him to modify it. And 
yet the character of Christ is never modified, even 
by a shade of rectification. It is one and the same 
throughout, He makes no improvements, prunes no 
extravagances, returns from no eccentricities. The 
balance of his character is never disturbed, or read- 
justed, and the astounding assumption on which it is 
based is never shaken, even by a suspicion that he 
falters in it. 

There is yet another point related to this, in 
which the attitude of Jesus is even more distinct 

Nery Chae Bs from any that was ever taken by man, 
ing pretensions and is yet triumphantly sustained. ‘if 
oa speak of the astonishing pretensions 
asserted concerning his person. Similar preten- 
sions have sometimes been assumed by maniacs, or 
insane persons, but never, so far as I know, by per- 
sons in the proper exercise of their reason. Certain 
it is that no mere man could take the same attitude 
of supremacy towards the race, and inherent affinity 


OHARACTER OF JESUS. 23 


or oneness with God, without fatally shocking the 
confidence of the world by his effrontery. Imagine 
a human creature saying to the world—“<I came 
forth from the Father ”—“ ye are from beneath, I 
am from above”; facing all the intelligence and 
even the philosophy of the world, and saying, in 
bold assurance—“ behold, a greater than Solomon 
is here”’—“TI am the light of the world ”—“ the 
way, the truth, and the life”; publishing to all peo- 
ples and religions—“ No man cometh to the Father, 
but by me”; promising openly in his death—“TI 
will draw all men unto me”; addressing the Infinite 
Majesty, and testifying—“I have glorified thee on 
the earth”; calling to the human race—“ Come 
unto me”; “follow me”; laying his hand upon all 
the dearest and most intimate affections of life, and 
demanding a precedent love—“ he that loveth father 
or mother more than me, is not worthy of me.” 
Was there ever displayed an example of effrontery 
and spiritual conceit so preposterous? Was there 
ever a man that dared put himself on the world in 
such pretensions ?—as if all light was in him; as if 
to follow him and be worthy of him was to be the 
conclusive or chief excellence of mankind! What 
but mockery and disgust does he challenge as the 
certain reward of his audacity! But no one is of- 
fended with Jesus on this account, and what is a 
sure test of his success, it is remarkable that, of all 
the readers of the gospel, it probably never even 


24 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


occurs to one in a hundred thousand, to blame his 
conceit, or the egregious vanity of his pretensions. 
Nor is there any thing disputable in these preten- 
sions, least of all, any trace of myth or fabulous 
he iy Bek tradition. They enter into the very 
sions eee also web of his ministry, so that if they are 
into his actions extracted and nothing left transcending 
mere humanity, nothing at all is left. Indeed, there 
is a tacit assumption, continually maintained, that 
far exceeds the range of these formal pretensions. 
He says—“I and the Father that sent me.” What 
figure would a man present in such language—I and 
the Father? He goes even beyond this, and appar- 
ently without any thought of excess or presump- 
tion ; classing himself with the Infinite Majesty in 
a common plural, he says— We will come unto him, 
and make our abode with him. Imagine any, the 
greatest and holiest of mankind, any prophet, or 
apostle, saying we, of himself and the Great Jeho- 
vah! What a conception did he give us concerning 
himself, when he assumed the necessity of such in- 
formation as this—“ my Father is greater than 1”; 
and above all, when he calls himself, as he often 
does, in a tone of condescension—* the Son of Man.” 
See him also on the top of Olivet, looking down on 
the guilty city and weeping words of compassion 
like these—imagine some man weeping over London 
or New York, in the like—“ How often would I have 
gathered thy children together as a hen doth gather 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 25 


her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!” 
See him also in the supper, instituting a rite of re- 
membrance for himself, a scorned, outcast man, and 
saying—“this is my body”—“ this do in remem- 
brance of me.” 

I have dwelt thus on the transcendent preten- 
sions of Jesus, because there is an argument here 
for his superhumanity, which can not be a: 
resisted. For eighteen hundred years, fended Ly these 
these prodigious assumptions have been P'°""°"™ 
published and preached to a world that is quick to 
lay hold of conceit, and bring down the lofty airs of 
pretenders, and yet, during all this time, whole na- 
tions of people, composing as well the learned and 
powerful as the ignorant and humble, have paid 
their homage to the name of Jesus, detecting never 
any disagreement between his merits and his pre- 
tensions, offended never by any thought of his ex- 
travagance. In which we have absolute proof that 
he practically maintains his amazing assumptions! 
Indeed it will even be found that, in the common 
apprehension of the race, he maintains the merit of 
a most peculiar modesty, producing no conviction 
more distinctly, than that of his intense lowliness 
and humility. His worth is seen to be so great, his 
authority so high, his spirit so celestial, that instead 
of being offended by his pretensions, we take the 
impression of one in whom it is even a condescen- 
sion to breathe our air. I say not that his friends 


26 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


and followers take this impression, it is received as 
naturally and irresistibly by unbelievers, I do not 
recollect any skeptic or infidel who has even thought 
to accuse him as a conceited person, or to assault 
him in this, the weakest and absurdest, if not the 
strongest and holiest, point of his character. 

Come now, all ye that tell us in your wisdom of 
the mere natural humanity of Jesus, and help us to 

What mere 4nd how it is, that he is only a natural 
mat “cut we development of the human ; select your 
tensions ? best and wisest character; take the 
range, if you will, of all the great philosophers and 
saints, and choose out one that is most competent ; 
or if, perchance, some one of you may imagine that 
he is himself about upon a level with Jesus (as we 
hear that some of you do), let him come forward in 
this trial and say—“ follow me ”—* be worthy of 
me ”—*“T am the light of the world ”—“ ye are from 
beneath, I am from above”—“ behold a greater 
than Solomon is here”; take on all these transcend- 
ent assumptions, and see how soon your glory will 
be sifted out of you by the detective gaze, and 
darkened by the contempt of mankind! Why not? 
is not the challenge fair? Do you not tell us that 
you can say as divine things as he? Is it not in 
you, too, of course, to do what is human? are you 
not in the front rank of human developments? do 
you not rejoice in the power to rectify many mis- 
takes and errors in the words of Jesus? Give us 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 27 


then this one experiment, and see if it does not 
prove to you a truth that is of some consequence ; 
viz., that you are a man, and that Jesus Christ is— 
more. 





But there is also a passive side to the character 
of Jesus which is equally peculiar, and which like- 
wise demands our attention. I recol-  p.ouiarinthe 
lect no really great character in history, P@ssive virtues. 
excepting such as may have been formed under 
Christianity, that can properly be said to have united 
the passive virtues, or to have considered them any 
essential part of a finished character. Socrates 
comes the nearest to such an impression, and there- 
fore most resembles Christ in the submissiveness of 
his death. It does not appear, however, that his 
- mind had taken this turn previously to his trial, and 
the submission he makes to the public sentence is, 
in fact, a refusal only to escape from the prison 
surreptitiously ; which he does, partly because he 
thinks it the duty of every good citizen not to break 
the laws, and partly, if we judge from his manner, 
because he is detained by a subtle pride ; as if it 
were something unworthy of a grave philosopher, 
to be stealing away, as a fugitive, from the laws and 
‘ tribunals of his country. The Stoics, indeed, have 
it for one of their great principles, that the true 
wisdom of life consists in a passive power, viz.,in . 
being able to bear suffering rightly. But they 


28 OHARACTER OF JESUS. — 


mean by this, the bearing of suffering so as not to 
feel it ; a steeling of the mind against sensibility, 
and a raising of the will into such power as to drive 
back the pangs of life, or shake them off. But this, 
in fact, contains no allowance of passive virtue at 
all ; on the contrary, it is an attempt so to exalt the 
active powers, as even to exclude every sort of pas- 
sion, or passivity. And Stoicism corresponds, in 
this respect, with the general sentiment of the 
world’s great characters. They are such as like to 
see things in the heroic vein, to see spirit and cour- 
age breasting themselves against wrong, and, where 
the evil can not be escaped by resistance, dying in a 
manner of defiance. Indeed it has been the im- 
pression of the world generally, that patience, gen- 
tleness, readiness to suffer wrong without resistance, 
is but another name for weakness. 

But Christ, in opposition to all such impressions, 
manages to connect these non-resisting and gentle 
passivities with a character of the severest gran- 
deur and majesty ; and, what is more, convinces us 
that no truly great character can exist without them. 

Observe him, first, in what may be called the 
common trials of existence. For if you will put a 

character to the severest of all tests, 
te oes not Bl. see whether it can bear without falter- 
mon trials of ing, the little common ills and hin- 
drances of life. Many aman will go to 
his martyrdom, with a spirit of firmness and heroie 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 29 


composure, whom a little weariness or nervous ex- 
haustion, some silly prejudice, or capricious opposi- 
tion, would, for the moment, throw into a fit of 
vexation, or ill-nature. Great occasions rally great 
principles, and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a 
bearing that is even above itself. But trials that 
make no occasion at all, leave it to show the good- 
ness and beauty it has in its own disposition. And 
here precisely is the superhuman glory of Christ as 
a character, that he is just as perfect, exhibits 
just as great a spirit, in little trials as in great ones, 
In all the history of his life, we are not able to de- 
tect the faintest indication that he slips or falters. 
And this is the more remarkable, that he is prose- 
cuting so great a work, with so great enthusiasm ; 
counting it his meat and drink, and pouring into it 
all the energies of his life. For when men have 
great works on hand, their very enthusiasm runs to 
impatience. When thwarted or unreasonably hin- 
dered, their soul strikes fire against the obstacles 
they meet, they worry themselves at every hin- 
drance, every disappointment, and break out in 
stormy and fanatical violence. But Jesus, for some 
reason, is just as even, just as serene, in all his petty 
vexations, and hindrances, as if he had nothing on 
hand to do. A kind of sacred patience invests him 
everywhere. Having no element of crude wili 
mixed with his work, he is able, in all trial and op- 
position, to hold a condition of serenity above the 


30 OHARAOTER OF JESUS. 


clouds, and let them sail under him, without ever 
obscuring the sun. He is poor, and hungry, and 
weary, and despised, insulted by his enemies, de- 
serted by his friends, but never disheartened, never 
fretted or ruffled. 

You see, meantime, that he is no Stoic ; he visi- 
bly feels every such ill as his delicate and sensitive 
nature must, but he has some sacred and sovereign 
good present, to mingle with his pains, which, as it 
were, naturally and without any self-watching, 
allays them. He does not seem to rule his temper, 
but rather to have none ; for temper, in the sense 
of passion, is a fury that follows the will, as the 
lightnings follow the disturbing forces of the winds 
among the clouds ; and accordingly, where there is 
no self-will to roll up the clouds and hurl them 
through the sky, the lightnings hold their equilib- 
rium, and are as though they were not. 

As regards what is called pre-eminently his pas- 
sion, the scene of martyrdom that closes his life, it 

is easy to distinguish a character in it 
nos pss" which separates it from all mere human 
jan. ™"y* martyrdoms. Thus, it will be observed, 

that his agony, the scene in which his 
suffering is bitterest and most evident, is, on human 
principles, wholly misplaced. It comes before the 
time, when as yet there is no arrest, and no human 
prospect that there will be any. He is at large, to 
go where he pleases, and in perfect outward safety. 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 31 


His disciples have just been gathered round him 
in a scene of more than family tenderness and af- 
fection. Indeed it is but a very few hours since 
that he was coming into the city, at the head of a 
vast procession, followed by loud acclamations, and 
attended by such honors as may fitly celebrate the 
inaugural of a king. Yet here, with no bad sign ap- 
parent, we see him plunged into a scene of deepest 
distress, and racked, in his feeling, with a more 
than mortal agony. Coming out of this, assured 
and comforted, he is shortly arrested, brought to 
trial and crucified ; where, if there be any thing 
questionable in his manner, it is in the fact that he 
is even more composed than some would have him 
to be, not even stooping to defend himself or vin- 
dicate his innocence. And when he dies, it is not 
as when the martyrs die. They die for what they 
have said, and remaining silent will not recant. He 
dies for what he has not said, and still is silent. 

By the misplacing of his agony thus, and the 
strange silence he observes when the real hour of 
agony is come, we are put entirely at 
fault on natural principles. But it was eres 
not for him to wait, as being only a man, ae pee ea 
till he is arrested, and the hand of death 
is upon him, then to be nerved by the occasion to a 
show of victory. He that was before Abraham, - 
must also be before his occasions, In a time of 
safety, in a cool hour of retirement, unaccountably 


382 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


to his friends, he falls into a dreadful contest and 
struggle of mind; coming out of it finally to go 
through his most horrible tragedy of crucifixion, 
with the serenity of a spectator! 

Why now this so great intensity of sorrow? why 
this agony? Was there not something unmanly in 

ee it, something unworthy of a really great 
ony soul? Take him to be only a man, and 

there probably was; nay, if he were a 
woman, the same might be said. But this one thing 
is clear, that no one of mankind, whether man or 
woman, ever had the sensibility to suffer so intense- 
ly ; even showing the body, for the mere struggle 
and pain of the mind, exuding and dripping with 
blood. Evidently there is something mysterious 
here ; which mystery is vehicle to our feeling, and 
rightfully may be, of something divine. "What, we 
begin to ask, should be the power of a superhuman 
sensibility ? and how far should the human vehicle 
shake under such a power? How too should an in- 
nocent and pure spirit be exercised, when about to 
suffer, in his own person, the greatest wrong ever 
committed ? 

Besides there is a vicarious spirit in love; all 
love inserts itself vicariously into the sufferings and 
woes and, in a certain sense, the sins of others, 

The pathol taking them on itself as a burden. 
ogy isdivine. How then, if perchance Jesus should 
be divine, an embodiment of God’s love in the 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 33 


world — how should he feel, and by what signs 
of feeling manifest his sensibility, when a fallen 
race are just about to do the damning sin that 
crowns their guilty history ; to crucify the only p2r- 
fect being that ever came into the world ; to crucify 
even him, the messenger and representative to them 
of the love of God, the deliverer who has taken their 
case and cause upon him! Whosoever duly pon- 
ders these questions, will find that he is led away, 
more and more, from any supposition of the mere 
mortality of Jesus. What he looks upon, he will 
more and more distinctly see to be the pathology 
of a superhuman anguish. It stands, he will per- 
ceive, in no mortal key. It will be to him the an- 
guish, visibly, not of any pusillanimous feeling, but 
of holy character itself; nay, of a mysteriously 
transcendent, or somehow divine character. 

But why did he not defend his cause and justify 
his innocence in the trial? Partly because he had 
the wisdom to see that there really was is defence 
and could be no trial, and that one who Pe&re Piste all 
undertakes to plead with a mob, only ™*% 
mocks his own virtue, throwing words into the air 
that is already filled with the clamors of prejudice. 
To plead innocence in such a case, is only to make 
a protestation, such as indicates fear, and is really 
unworthy of a great and composed spiit. A map 
would have done it, but Jesus did not. Besides, 
there was a plea of innocence in the manner of Je- 


34 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


sus, and the few very significant words that he 
dropped, that had an effect on the mind of Pilate, 
more searching and powerful than any formal pro- 
testations. And the more we study the conduct of 
Jesus during the whole scene, the more shall we be 
satisfied that he said enough ; the more admire the 
mysterious composure, the wisdom, the self-posses- 
sion, and the superhuman patience of the sufferer. 
It was visibly the death-scene of a transcendent 
love. He dies not as a man, but rather as some one 
might, wko is mysteriously more and higher. So 
thought aloud the hard-faced soldier—* Truly this 
was the Son of God.” Asif he had said—“TI have 
seen men die—this is nota man. They call him Son 
of God—he can not be less.” Can he be less to us? 





But Christ shows himself to be a superhuman 

Dish cen ie character, not in the personal traits 
what ishumanly Only, exhibited in his life, but even 
me more sublimely in the undertakings, 
works, and teachings, by which he proved his Mes- 
siahship. y 

Consider then the reach of his undertaking ; 
which, if he was only a man, shows him to have 
been the most extravagant and even wildest of all 
human enthusiasts. Contrary to every religious 
prejudice of his nation and even of his time, con- 
trary to the comparatively narrow and exclusive re- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 35 


ligion of Moses itself, and to all his training under 
it, he undertakes to organize a kingdom of God, or 
kingdom of heaven on earth. His purpose includes a 
new moral creation of the race—not of the Jews only 
and of men proselyted to their covenant, but of the 
whole human race. He declared thus, at an early 
date in his ministry, that many shall come from the 
east and the west and sit down with Abraham, and 
Isaac and Jacob, in the kingdom of God ; that the 
field is the world ; and that God so loves the world, 
as to give for it his only-begotten Son. He also 
declared that his gospel shall be published to all 
nations, and gave his apostles their commission to 
go into all the world, and publish his gospel to every 
creature. 

Here, then, we have the grand idea of his mission 
—it is to new-create the human race and restore it 
to God, in the unity of a spiritual king- He assumes to 
dom. And upon this single fact, Rein- {53° OF Goa 
hard erects a complete argument for “"°"8™°" 
his extra human character ; going into a formal re- 
view of all the great founders of states and most 
celebrated lawgivers, the great heroes and defenders 
of nations, all the wise kings and statesmen, all the 
philosophers, all the prophet founders of religions, 
and discovering as a fact that no such thought as 
this, or nearly proximate to this, had ever before 
been taken up by any living character in history ; 
showing also how it had happened to every other 


36 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


great character, however liberalized by culture, to 
be limited in some way to the interest of his own 
people, or empire, and set in opposition, or antag- 
onism, more or less decidedly, to the rest of the 
world. But to Jesus alone, the simple Galilean 
carpenter, it happens otherwise ; that, never haying 
seen a map of the world in his whole life, or heard 
the name of half the great nations on it, he under- 
takes, coming out of his shop, a scheme as much 
vaster and more difficult than that of Alexander, as 
it proposes more and what is more divinely beneyvo- 
lent! This thought of a universal kingdom, ce- 
mented in God—why, the immense Roman empire 
of his day, constructed by so many ages of war and 
conquest, is a bauble in comparison, both as regards 
the extent and the cost! And yet the rustic trades- 
man of Galilee propounds even this for his errand, 
and that in a way of assurance, as simple and quiet, 
as if the immense reach of his plan were, in fact, a 
matter to him of no consideration. 

Nor is this all; there is included in his plan, 
what, to any mere man, would be yet more remote 

His plan cov. from the possible confidence of his 
ers ages of time. frailty ; it is a plan as universal in time, 
as it is in the scope of its objects. It does not 
expect to be realized in a lifetime, or even in 
many centuries to come. He calls it understand- 
ingly, his grain of mustard-seed ; which, however, 
is to grow, he declares, and overshadow the whole 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 37 


earth. But the courage of Jesus, counting a thou- 
sand years to be only a single day, is equal to the 
run of his work. He sees a rock of stability, where 
men see only frailty and weakness. Peter himself, 
the impulsive and always unreliable Peter, turns 
into rock and becomes a great foundation, as he 
looks upon him. “On this rock,” he says, “I will 
build my church, and the gates of hell shall not pre- 
vail against it.” His expectation, too, reaches boldly: 
out beyond his own death ; that, in fact, is to be 
the seed of his great empire—“ except a corn of 
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth,” he 
says, “alone.” And if we will see with what confi- 
dence and courage he adheres to his plan, when the 
time of. his death approaches—how far he is from 
giving it up as lost, or as an exploded vision of his 
youthful enthusiasm—we have only to observe his 
last interview with the two sisters of Bethany, in 
whose hospitality he was so often comforted. When 
the box of precious ointment is broken upon his 
head, which Judas reproves as a useless expense, he 
discovers a sad propriety or even prophecy, in what 
the woman has done, as connected with his death, 
now at hand. But it does not touch his courage, 
we perceive, or the confidence of his plan, or even 
cast a shade on his prospect. “Let heralone. She 
hath done what she could. She is come aforehand 
to anoint my body to the burying. Verily I say 
unto you, wheresoever this gospel shall be preached 


38 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


throughout the whole world, this also that this 
woman hath done shall be told for a memorial of 
her.” Such was the sublime confidence he had in 
a plan that was to run through all future ages, and 
would scarcely begin to show its fruit during his 
own lifetime. 

Is this great idea then, which no man ever before 
conceived, the raising of the whole human race to God, 

Such attempts 2 Plan sustained with such evenness of 
SOU courage, and a confidence of the world’s 
future so far transcending any human example—is 
this a human development? Regard the benevo- 
lence of it, the universality of it, the religious 
grandeur of it, as a work readjusting the relations 
of God and his government with men—the cost, the 
length of time it will cover, and the far-off date of 
its completion—is it in this scale that a Nazarene 
carpenter, a poor uneducated villager, lays out his 
plans and graduates the confidence of his undertak- 
ings? There have been great enthusiasts in the 
world, and they have shown their infirmity by lu- 
natic airs, appropriate to their extravagance. But 
it is not human, we may safely affirm, to lay out 
projects transcending all human ability, like this of 
Jesus, and which cannot be completed in many 
thousands of years, doing it in all the airs of sobri- 
ety, entering on the performance without parade, 
and yielding life to it firmly as the inaugural of its 
triumph, No human creature sits quietly down to 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 39 


a perpetual project, one that proposes to be execu- 
ted only at the end, or final harvest of the world. 
hat is not human, but divine. 





Passing now to what is more interior in his min- 
istry, taken as a revelation of his character, we are 
struck with another distinction, Viz, 4. takes rank 
that he takes rank with the poor, and ith the hum 
grounds all the immense expectations *°“*'y- 
of his cause, on a beginning made with the lowly 
and dejected classes of the world. He was born to 
the lot of the poor. His manners, tastes, and intel- 
lectual attainments, however, visibly outgrew his 
condition, and that in such a degree that, if he had 
been a mere human character, he must have suf- 
fered some painful distuste for the kind of society 
in which he lived. The great, as we perceive, 
flocked to hear him, and sometimes came even by 
night to receive his instructions. He saw the high- 
est circles of society and influence open to him, if 
he only desired to enter them. And, if he was a 
properly human character, what virtuous, but rising 
young man would have had a thought of impropri- 
ety, in accepting the elevation within his reach; 
considering it as the proper reward of his industry 
and the merit of his character—not to speak of the 
contempt for his humble origin, and his humble as- 
sociates, which every upstart person, of only ordi- 
nary virtue, is so commonly seen to manifest. Still 


40 ‘CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


he adheres to the poor, and makes them the object 
of his ministry. And what is more peculiar, he vis- 
ibly has a kind of interest in their society, which is 
wanting in that of the higher classes ; perceiving, 
apparently, that they have a certain aptitude for 
receiving right impressions, which the others have 
not. They are not the wise and prudent, filled with 
the conceit of learning and station, but they are the 
ingenuous babes of poverty, open to conviction, 
prepared, by their humble lot, to receive thoughts 
and doctrines in advance of their age. Therefore 
he loves the poor, and, without descending to their 
low manners, he delights to be identified with them. 
He is more assiduous in their service than other 
men have been in serving the great. He goes about 
on foot, teaching them.and healing their sick ; oc- 
cupying his great and elevated mind, for whole 
years, with details of labor and care, which the 
nurse of no hospital had ever laid upon him—in- 
sanities, blind eyes, fevers, fluxes, leprosies, and 
sores. His patients are all below his level and un- 
able to repay him, even by a breath of congenial 
sympathy ; and nothing supports him but the con- 
sciousness of good which attends his labors. 
Meantime, consider what contempt for the poor 
No great so. had hitherto prevailed among all the 
cial architect oreat statesmen and philosophers of 
wisdom of it. the world. The poor were not society, 
or any part of society. They were only the con- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 41 


veniences and drudges of society ; appendages of 
luxury and state, tools of ambition, material to be 
used in the wars. No man who had taken up the 
idea of some great change or reform in society, no 
philosopher who had conceived the notion of build- 
ing up an ideal state or republic, ever thought of 
beginning with the poor. Influence was seen to re- 
side in the higher classes, and the only hope of 
reaching the world, by any scheme of social regenera- 
tion, was to begin with them, and through them oper- 
ate its results. But Christ, if we call him a philoso- 
pher, and, if he is only a man, we can call him by no 
higher name, was the poor man’s philosopher ; the 
first and only one that had ever appeared. Seeing 
the higher circles open to him, and tempted to im- 
agine that, if he could once get footing for his doc- 
trine among the influential and the great, he should 
thus secure his triumph more easily, he had yet no 
such thought. He laid his foundations, as it were, 
below all influence, and, as men would judge, threw 
himself away. 

And precisely here did he display a wisdom and 
character totally in advance of his age. Eighteen 
centuries have passed away, and we now seem just 
beginning to understand the transcendent depth of 
this feature in his mission and his character. We 
appear to be just waking up to it as a discovery, 
that the blessing and upraising of the masses are 
the fundamental interest of society—a discovery, 
ae 


a2 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


however, which is only a proof that the life of Jesus 
has at length begun to penetrate society and public 
history. It is precisely this which is working so 
many and great changes in our times, giving liberty 
and right to the enslaved many, seeking their edu- 
cation, encouraging their efforts by new and better 
hopes, producing an aversion to war, which has been 
the fatal source of their misery and depression, and 
opening, as we hope, a new era of comfort, light, and 
virtue in the world. It is as if some higher and 
better thought had visited our race—which higher 
thought is in the life of Jesus. The schools of all 
the philosophers are gone, hundreds of years ago, 
and all their visions have died away into thin air ; 
but the poor man’s philosopher still lives, bringing 
up his poor to liberty, light, and character, and draw- 
ing the nations on to a brighter and better day. 





At the same time, the more than human character 
of Jesus is displayed also in the fact that, identifying 
himself thus with the poor, he is yet able to do it, 
without eliciting any feelings of partisanship in 

And still he t2em. To one who will be at the pains 
raises igge 10 reflect a little, nothing will seem more 
difficult than this; to become the patron 

of a class, a downtrodden and despised class, with- 
out rallying in them a feeling of intense malignity. 
And that for the reason, partly, that no patron, how- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 43 


ever just or magnanimous, is ever quite able to sup- 
press the feelings of a partisan in himself. A little 
ambition, pricked on by a little abuse, a faint desire 
of popularity playing over the face of his benevo- 
lence, and tempting him to loosen a little of ill- 
nature, as tinder to the passions of his sect—some- 
thing of this kind is sure to kindle some fire of ma- 
lignity in his clients. 

Besides, men love to be partisans. Even Paul 
and Apollos and Peter had their sects or schools, 
glorying in one against another. With y, human 
all their efforts, they could not suppress '¢24¢ i" this- 
a weakness so contemptible. But no such feeling 
could ever get footing under Christ. If his dis- 
ciples had forbidden one to heal in the name of Je- 
sus, because he followed not with them, he gently 
rebuked them, and made them feel that he had 
larger views than to suffer any such folly. As the 
friend of the poor and oppressed class, he set him- 
self openly against their enemies, and chastised 
them as oppressors, with the most terrible rebukes. 
He exposed the absurdity of their doctrine, and si- 
lenced them in argument; he launched his thunder- | 
bolts against their base hypocrisies ; but it does not 
appear that the populace ever testified their pleasure, | 
even by a cheer, or gave vent to any angry emotion 
under cover of his leadership. For there was some- 
thing still, in the manner and air of Jesus, which 
made them feel it to be inappropriate, and even 


Ht CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


made it impossible. It was as if some being were 
here, taking their part, whom it were even an irrey- 
erence to applaud, much more to second by any 
partisan clamor. They would as soon have thought 
of cheering the angel in the sun, or of rallying under 
him as the head of their faction. 

On one occasion, when he had fed the multitudes 
by a miracle, he saw that their national superstitions 
were excited, and that, regarding him as the Messiak 
predicted in the Scriptures, they were about to take 
him by force and make him their king ; but this was 
a national feeling, not the feeling of a class. Its 
root was superstition, not hatred. His triumphal 
entry into Jerusalem, attended by the acclamations 
of the multitude, if this be not one of the fables or 
myths, which our modern criticism rejects, is yet no 
demonstration of popular faction, or party animos- 
ity. Robbing it of its mystical and miraculous 
character, as the inaugural of the Messiah, it has 
no real signification. In a few hours, after all, 
these hosannas are hushed, Jesus is alone and for- 
saken, and the very multitudes he might seem to 
have enlisted, are crying “Crucify him!” On the 
whole, it cannot be said that Jesus was ever popu- 
lar. He was followed at times, by great multitudes 
of people, whose love of the marvellous worked on 
their superstitions, to draw them after him. They 
came also to be cured of their diseases, They knew 
him as their friend. But there was yet something 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 45 


in him that forbade their low and malignant feel- 
ings gathering into a conflagration round him. He 
presents, indeed, an instance that stands alone in 
history, as God at the summit of the worlds, where 
a person has identified himself with a class, without 
creating a faction, and without becoming a popular 
character. 





Consider him next as a teacher ; his method and 
manner, and the other characteristics of his excel- 
lence, apart from his doctrine. That will be dis- 
tinctly considered in another place. 

First of all, we notice the perfect originality and 
independence of his teaching. We have a great 
many men who are original, in the sense Cee 
of being originators within a certain independent as 
boundary of educated thought. But “""™ 
the originality of Christ is uneducated. That he 
draws nothing from the stores of learning, can be 
seen at a glance. The impression we have in read~ 
ing his instructions, justifies to the letter, the lan- 
guage of his contemporaries, when they say, “this 
man hath never learned.” There is nothing in any 
of his allusions, or forms of speech that indicates 
learning. Indeed, there is nothing in him that be- 
longs to his age or country—no one opinion, or 
taste, or prejudice. The attempts that have been 
made, in a way of establishing his mere natural 
manhood, to show that he borrowed his sentiments 


46 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


from the Persians and the eastern forms of religion, 
or that he had been intimate with the Essenes, and 
borrowed from them, or that he must have been ac- 
quainted with the schools and religions of Egypt, 
deriving his doctrine from them—all attempts of 
the kind have so palpably failed, as not even to re- 
quire a deliberate answer. 

If he is simply a man, as we hear, then he is most 
certainly a new and singular kind of man, never be- 
fore heard of ; one who visibly is quite as great a 
miracle in the world as if he were nota man. We 
can see for ourselves, in the simple directness and 
freedom of his teachings, that whatever he advances 
is from himself. Shakspeare, for instance, whom we 
name as being probably the most creative and origi- 
nal spirit the world has ever produced, one of the 
class, too, that are called self-made men, is yet tinged, 
in all his works, with human learning. His glory is, 
indeed, that so much of what is great in history and 
historic character, lives and appears in his dramatic 
creations. He is the high-priest, we sometimes hear, 
of human nature. But Christ, understanding human 
nature so as to address if more skilfully than he, de- 
rives no help from historic examples. He is the high- 
priest, rather, of the divine nature, speaking as one 
that has come out from God, and has nothing to 
. borrow from the world. It is not to be detected, 
by any sign, that the human sphere in which he 
moved imparted any thing to him. His teachings 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 47 


are just as full of divine nature, as Shakspeare’s of 
human. 

Neither does he teach by the human methods. He 
does not speculate about God, as a school professor, 
drawing out conclusions by a practice Teaches by no 
on words, and deeming that the way of bums method. 
proof ; he does not build up a frame of evidence 
from below, by some constructive process, such as 
the philosophers delight in; but he simply speaks 
of God and spiritual things as one who has come 
out from Him, to tell us what he knows. And his ~ 
simple telling brings us the reality ; proves it to us 
in its own sublime self-evidence ; awakens even the 
consciousness of it in our own bosom ; so that formal 
arguments or dialectic proofs offend us by their cold- 
ness, and seem, in fact, to be only opaque substances 
set between us and the light. Indeed, he makes 
even the world luminous by his words—fills it with 
an immediate and new sense of God, which nothing 
has ever been able to expel. The incense of the 
upper world is brought out, in his garments, and 
flows abroad, as perfume, on the poisoned air. 

At the same time, he never reveals the infirmity 
so commonly shown by human teachers, when they 
veer a little from their point, or turn ea ic 
their doctrine off by shades of variation, dese eau 
to catch the assent of multitudes. He : 
never conforms to an expectation, even of his friends. 


When they look to find a great prophet in him, he 


48 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


offers nothing in the modes of the prophets. When 
they ask for places of distinction in his kingdom, he 
rebukes their folly, and tells them he has nothing to 
give, but a share in his reproaches and his poverty. 
When they look to see him take the sword as the 
Great Messiah of their nation, calling the people to 
his standard, he tells them he is no warrior and no 
king, but only a messenger of love to lost men; one 
that has come to mimister and die, but not to set up 
or restore the kingdom. Every expectation that 
rises up to greet him, is repulsed ; and yet, so great 
is the power of his manner, that multitudes are held 
fast, and can not yield their confidence. Enveloped 
as he is in the darkest mystery, they trust him still ; 
going after him, hanging on his words, as if detained 
by some charmed influence, which they can not shake 
off or resist. Never was there a teacher that so uni- 
formly baffled every expectation of his followers, 
never one that was followed so persistently. 

Again, the singular balance of character displayed 
in the teachings of Jesus, indicates an exemption 

Comprehen- from the standing infirmity of human 
five, under ro nature. Human opinions are formed 
wae: under a law that seems to be universal. 
First, two opposite extremes are thrown up, in two 
opposite leaders or parties ; then a third party en- 
ters, trying to find what truth they both are endeav- 
oring to vindicate, and settle thus a view of the sub- 
ject, that includes the truth and clears the one-sided 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 49 


extremes, which opposing words or figures, not yet 
measured in their force, had produced. It results, 
in this manner, that no man, even the broadest in 
his apprehensions, is ever at the point of equilibrium 
fas regards all subjects. Even the ripest of us are 
continually falling into some extreme, and losing our 
balance, afterward to be corrected by some other 
who discovers our error, or that of our school. 

But Christ was of no school or party, and never 
went to any extreme—words could never turn him 
to a one-sided view of anything This Qougncthoia 
is the remarkable fact that distinguishes 2 °"¢=sided view 
him from any other known teacher of the world. 
Having nothing to work out in a word-process, but 
every thing clear in the simple intuition of his super- 
human intelligence, he never pushes himself to any 
human eccentricity. It does not even appear that 
he is trying, as we do, to balance opposites and clear 
extravagances, but he does it, as one who can not 
imagine a one-sided view of any thing. He is never 
a radical, never a conservative. He will not allow 
his disciples to deny him before kings and govern- 
ments, he will not let them renounce their alle- 
giance to Cesar. He exposes the oppressions of 
the Pharisees in Moses’ seat, but, encouraging no 
factious resistance, says—“do as they command 
you.” His position as a reformer was universal ; 
according to his principles almost nothing, whether 
in church or state, or in social life, was right, and 


50 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


yet he is thrown into no antagonism against the 
world. How a man will do, when he engages only 


, in some one reform, acting from his own human 


force ; the fuming, storming phrenzy, the holy rage 
and tragic smoke of his violence, how he kindles 
against opposition, grows bitter and restive because 
of delay, and finally comes to maturity in a char- 
acter thoroughly detestable—all this we know, But 
Christ, with all the world upon his hands, and a re- 
form to be carried in almost every thing, is yet as 
quiet and cordial, and as little in the attitude of 
bitterness or impatience, as if all hearts were with 
him, or the work already done; so perfect is the 
balance of his feeling, so intuitively moderated is it 
by a wisdom not human. 

We can not stay to sketch a full outline of this 
particular and sublime excellence, as it was dis- 

cele an played in his life. It will be seen as 
the current su- Clearly in a single comparison or con- 
ee trast, as in many, or in a more extended 
inquiry. Take, then, for an example, what may be 
observed in his open repugnance to all superstition, 
combined with his equal repugnance to what is 
commonly praised as a mode of liberality. He lived 
in a superstitious age and among a superstitious 
people. He was a person of low education, and 
nothing, as we know, clings to the uneducated mind 
with the tenacity of a superstition. Lord Bacon, 
for example, a man certainly of the very highest in- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 51 


tellectual training, was yet harmed by superstitions 
too childish to be named with respect, and which 
clung to him despite of all his philosophy, even to 
his death. But Christ, with no learned culture at 
all, comes forth out of Galilee, as perfectly clean of 
all the superstitions of his time, as if he had been a 
disciple, from his childhood, of Hume or Strauss. 
“You children of superstition think,” he says, “that 
those Galileans, whose blood Pilate mingled with 
their sacrifices, and those eighteen upon whom the 
tower in Siloam fell, must have been monsters, to 
suffer such things, I tell you, nay; but except ye 
repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” To another 
company he says—“ You imagine, in your Pharisaic 
and legal morality, that the Sabbath of Moses stands 
in the letter; but I tell you that the Sabbath is 
made for man, and not man for the Sabbath ; little 
honor, therefore, do you pay to God, when you 
teach that it is not lawful to do good on this day. 
Your washings are a great point, you tithe herbs 
and seeds with a sanctimonious fidelity, would it 
not be as well for you. teachers of the law, to have 
some respect to the weightier matters of justice, 
faith, and benevolence?” Thus, while Socrates, 
one of the greatest and purest of human souls, a 
man who has attained to many worthy conceptions 
of God, hidden from his idolatrous countrymen, is 
constrained to sacrifice a cock to Esculapius, the 
uneducated Jesus lives and dies superior to every 


52 CHARACTER UF JESUS. 


superstition of his time ; believing nothing because 
it is believed, respecting nothing because it is sanc- 
tified by custom and by human observance. Even 
in the closing scene of his life, we see his learned 
and priestly associates refusing to go into the judg- 
ment-hall of Caiaphas, lest they should be ceremo- 
nially defiled and disqualified for the feast ; though 
detained by no scruple at all as regards the instiga- 
tion of a murder! While he, on the other hand, 
pitying their delusions, prays for them from his 
cross—“ Father, forgive them, for they know not 
what they do.” 

And yet Christ is no liberal, never takes the 
ground or boasts the distinction of a liberal among 

But no liber. DiS countrymen, because it is not a part 
ae of his infirmity, in discovering an error 
here, to fly to an excess there. His ground is char- 
ity, not liberality ; and the two are as wide apart in 
their practical implications, as adhering to all truth, 
and being loose in all. Charity holds fast the mi- 
nutest atoms of truth, as being precious and divine, 
offended by even so much as a thought of laxity. 
Liberality loosens the terms of truth; permitting 
easily and with careless magnanimity variations 
from it; consenting, as it were, in its own sover- 
eignty, to overlook or allow them; and subsiding 
thus, ere long, into a licentious indifference to all 
truth, and a general defect of responsibility in re- 
gard to it. Charity extends allowance to men; 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 53 


liberality, to falsities themselves. Charity takes the 
truth to be sacred and immovable ; liberality allows 
it to be marred and maimed at pleasure. How dif- 
ferent the manner of Jesus in this respect from that 
unreverent, feeble laxity, that lets the errors be as 


good as the truths, and takes it for a sign of intel- / 


lectual eminence, that one can be floated comforta- ~ 
bly in the abysses of liberalism. “Judge not,” he 
says, in holy charity, “that ye be not judged”; and 
again, in holy exactness, “ whosoever shall break, 
or teach to break, one of these least commandments 
shall be least in the kingdom of God”—in the same 
way, “he that is not with us is against us”; and 
again, “he that is not against us is for us ”—in the 
same way also, “ ye tithe mint, anise, and cummin”; 
and again, “these things ought ye to have done, 
and not to leave the other undone ”—once more, 
too, in the same way, “he that is without sin, let 
him cast the first stone”; and again, “ go, and sin no 
more.” So magnificent and sublime, so plainly di- 
vine, is the balance of Jesus. Nothing throws him 
off the centre on which truth rests ; no prejudice, no 
opposition, no attempt to right a mistake, or rectify 
a delusion, or reform a practice. If this be human, 
I do not know, for one, what it is to be human. 
Again, it is a remarkable and even superhuman 
distinction of Jesus, that, while heisad- 43, simplicity 
vancing doctrines so far transcending * Perfect. 
all deductions of philosophy, and opening mysteries 


54 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


that defy all human powers of explication, he is yet 
able to set his teachings in a form of simplicity, that 
accommodates all classes of minds. And this, for 
the reason that he speaks directly to men’s convic- 
tions themselves, without and apart from any learned 
and curious elaboration, such as the uncultivated 
can not follow. No one of the great writers of an- 
tiquity had even propounded, as yet, a doctrine of 
virtue which the multitude could understand. It 
was taught as being to xaAov [the fair], or to 
mpemov [the becoming], or something of that na- 
ture, as distant from all their apprehensions, and as 
destitute of motive power, as if it were a doctrine 
of mineralogy. Considered as a gift to the world 
at large, it was the gift of a stone, not of bread. 
But Jesus tells them directly, in a manner level to 
their understanding, what they want, what they 
must do and be, to inherit eternal life, and their 
inmost convictions answer to his words. Besides, 
his doctrine is not so much a doctrine as a biogra- 
phy, a personal power, a truth all motivity, a love 
walking the earth in the proximity of a mortal fel- 
lowship. He only speaks what goes forth as a feel- 
ing and a power in his life, breathing into all hearts. 
To be capable of his doctrine, only requires that 
the hearer be a human creature, wanting to know 
the truth. 

Call him, then, who will, a man, a human teacher ; 
what human teacher ever came down thus upon the 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 55 


soul of the race, as a beam of light from the skies— 
pure light, shining directly into the 
visual orb of the mind, a light for all that emene 3 
live, a full transparent day, in which 
truth bathes the spirit as an element. Others talk | 
and speculate about truth, and those who can may 
follow ; but Jesus is the truth, and lives it, and if 
he is a mere human teacher, he is the first who was 
ever able to find a form for truth, at all adequate to 
the world’s uses. And yet the truths he teaches 
outreach all the doctrines of all the philosophers of 
the world. He excels them a hundred-fold more, 
in the scope and grandeur of his doctrine, than he 
does in his simplicity itself. . 
Is this human, or is it plainly divine? If you 
will see what is human, or what the wisdom of hu- 
manity would ordain, it is this—exactly 
what the subtle and accomplished Celsus, ,.A {v4 
the great adversary of Christianity in its fY<",)'° "* 
original promulgation, alleges for one of 
his principal arguments against it. “Woollen 
manufacturers,” he says, “ shoemakers and curriers, 
the most uneducated and boorish of men are zeal- 
ous advocates of this religion; men who can not 
open their mouths before the learned, and who only 
try to gain over the women and children in fami- 
lies.” * And again, what is only the same objection, 
under a different form, assuming that religion, like 


* Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 19. 


56 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


a philosophy, must be for the iearned, he says, “ He 
must be void of understanding who can believe 
that Greeks and barbarians, in Asia, Europe, and 
Lybia—all nations to the ends of the earth—can 
unite in one and the same religious doctrine.” * So 
, also, Plato says, “it is not easy to find the Father 
and Creator of all existence, and when he is found 
it is impossible to make him known to all.” + “ But 
exactly this,” says Justin Martyr, “is what our 
Christ has effected by his power.” And Tertullian, 
also, glorying in the simplicity of the gospel, as al- 
ready proved to be a truly divine excellence, says, 
“Every Christian artisan has found God, and points 
him out to thee, and in fact, shows thee every thing 
which is sought for in God, although Plato main- 
tains that the Creator of the world is not easily 
found, and that, when he is found, he can not be 
made known to all.” { Here, then, we have Christ 
against Celsus, and Christ against Plato. These 
agree in assuming that we have a God, whom only 
the great can mount high enough in argument to 
know. Christ reveals a God whom the humblest 
artisan can teach, and all mankind embrace, with 
a faith that unifies them all. 

Again, the morality of Jesus has a practical 
superiority to that of all human teachers, in the 

* Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 33. 


+ Timzus. 


t Neander’s Memorials of Christian Life, p. 19. 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 57 


fact that it is not an artistic, or theoretically elabo- 
rated scheme, but one thatis propounded 4.0 ua 
in precepts that carry their own evidence, ty is not artis- 
and are, in fact, great spiritual laws 

ordained by God, in the throne of religion. He 
did not draw long arguments to settle what the 
summum bonum is, and then produce a scheme of 
ethics to correspond. He did not go into the vexed 
question, what is the foundation of virtue? and 
hang a system upon his answer. Nothing falls into 
an artistic shape, as when Plato or Socrates asked 
what kind of action is beautiful in action? reduc- 
ing the principles of morality to a form as difficult 
for the uncultivated, as the art of sculpture itself. 
Yet Christ excels them all in the beauty of his pre- 
cepts, without once appearing to consider their 
beauty. He simply comes forth telling us, from 
God, what to do, without deducing any thing ina 
critical way ; and yet, while nothing has ever yet 
been settled by the critics and theorizing philoso- 
phers, that could stand fast and compel the assent 
of the race, even for a year, the morality of Christ 
is about as firmly seated in the convictions of men, 
as the law of gravity in their bodies. 

He comes into the world full of all moral beauty, 
as God of physical; and as God was not obliged 
to set himself to a course of esthetic study, when 
he created the forms and landscapes of the world, 
so Christ comes to his rules, by no critical practice 


58 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


in words. He opens his lips, and the creative glory 
But inmi. Of Dis mind pours itself forth in living 
tive and orig- precepts—Do to others as ye-would that 
others should do to you—Blessed are 
the peacemakers—Smitten upon one cheek, turn the 
other—Resist not evil—Forgive your enemies—Do 
good to them that hate you—Lend not, hoping to 
receive—Receive the truth as little children, Omit- 
ting all the deep spiritual doctrines he taught, and 
taking all the human teachers on their own ground, 
the ground of preceptive morality, they are seen at 
once to be meager and cold; little artistic inven- 
tions, gleams of high conceptions caught by study, 
having about the same relation to the Christran 
morality that a statue has to the flexibility, the self- 
active force, and flushing warmth of man, as he 
goes forth in the image of his Creator, to be the 
reflection of His beauty and the living instrument 
of his will, Indeed, it is the very distinction of 
Jesus that he teaches, not a verbal, but an original, 
vital, and divine morality. He does not dress up a 
moral picture and ask you to observe its beauty, he 
only tells you how to live ; and the most beautiful 
characters the world has ever seen, have been those 
who received and lived his precepts without once 
conceiving their beauty. 
Once more, it is a high distinction of 
ion we 25 Christ’s character, as seen in his teach- 
Cig ings, that he is never anxious for the 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 59 


success of his doctrine. Fully conscious of the fact 
that the world is against him, scoffed at, despised, 
hated, alone too, in his cause, and without partisans 
that have any public influence, no man has ever 
been able to detect in him the least anxiety for the 
final success of his doctrine. He is never jealous 
of contradiction. When his friends display their 
dulness and incapacity, or even when they forsake 
him, he is never ruffled or disturbed. He rests on 
his words, with a composure as majestic as if he 
were sitting on the circle of the heavens. Now the 
consciousness of truth, we are not about to deny, 
has an effect of this nature in every truly great 
mind. But when it has had an effect so complete? 
What human teacher, what great philosopher, has 
not shown some traces of anxiety for his school, 
that indicated his weakness; some pride in his 
friends, some dislike of his enemies, some traces of 
wounded ambition, when disputed or denied? But 
here is a lone man, a humble, uneducated man, 
never schooled into the elegant fiction of an assumed 
composure, or practised in the conventional digni- 
ties of manners, and yet, finding all the world 
against him, the world does not rest on its axle 
more firmly than he upon his doctrine. Questioned 
by Pilate what he means by truth, it is enough to 
answer—“ He that is of the truth heareth my voice.” 
If this be human, no other man of the race, we are 
sure, has ever dignified humanity by a like exampla 


60 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


Such is Christ as a teacher. When has the world 
seen a phenomenon like this ; a lonely uninstructed 
youth, coming forth amid the moral darkness of 
Galilee, even more distinct from his age, and from 
every thing around him, than a Plato would be ris- 
ing up alone in some wild tribe in Oregon, assum- 
ing thus a position at the head of the world, and 
maintaining it, for eighteen centuries, by the pure 
self-evidence of his life and doctrine! Does he this 
by the force of mere human talent or genius? [If 
so, it is time that we begin to look to genius for 
miracles ; for there is really no greater miracle. 





There is yet one other and more inclusive dis- 
tinction of the character of Jesus, which must not 
j be omitted, and which sets him off more 
mae *4,224 widely from all the mere men of the 
by familiarity. race, just because it raises a contrast 
which is, at once, total and experimental Human 
characters are always reduced in their eminence, 
and the impressions of awe they have raised, by a 
closer and more complete acquaintance. "Weakness 
and blemish are discovered by familiarity ; admira- 
tion lets in qualifiers ; on approach, the halo dims a 
little. But it was not so with Christ. With his 
disciples, in closest terms of intercourse, for three 
whole years ; their brother, friend, teacher, monitor, 
guest, fellow-traveler ; seen by them under all the 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 61 


cond*tions of public ministry, and private society, 
where the ambition of show, or the pride of power, 
or the ill-nature provoked by annoyance, or the 
vanity drawn out by confidence, would most certain- 
ly be reducing him to the criticism even of persons 
most unsophisticated, he is yet visibly raising their 
sense of his degree and quality ; becoming a greater 
wonder and holier mystery, and gathering to his 
person feelings of reverence and awe, at once more 
general and more sacred. Familiarity operates a 
kind of apotheosis, and the man becomes divinity, 
in simply being known. 

At first, he is the Son of Mary and the Nazarene 
tarpenter. Next, he is heard speaking with author- 
ity, as contrasted even with the Scribes. Next, he 
is conceived by some to be certainly Elias, or some 
one of the prophets, returned in power to the world. 
Peter takes him up, at that point, as being certainly 
the Christ, the great mysterious Messiah ; only not 
so great that he is not able to reprove him, when he 
begins to talk of being killed by his enemies ; pro- 
testing “be it far from thee, Lord.” But the next 
we see of the once bold apostle, he is beckoning to 
another, at the table, to whisper the Lord and ask 
who it is that is going to betray him ; unable him- 
self to so much as invade the sacred ear of his 
Master with the audible and open question. Then, 
shortly after, when he comes out of the hall of Caia- 
phas, flushed and flurried with his threefold lie, and 


62 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


his base hypocrisy of cursing, what do we see but 
that, simply catching the great Master’s eye, his 
heart breaks down, riven with insupportable an- 
guish, and is utterly dissolved in childish tears. 
And so it will be discovered in all the disciples, that 
Christ is more separated from them, and holds them 
in deeper awe, the closer he comes to them and the 
more perfectly they know him. 

The same, too, is true of his enemies. At first, 
they look on him only as some new fanatic, that has 
come to turn the heads of the people. Next, they 
want to know whence he drew his opinions, and his 
singular accomplishments in the matter of public 
address ; not being, as all that knew him testify, an 
educated man. Next, they send out a company to 
arrest him, and, when they hear him speak, they are 
eo deeply impressed that they dare not do it, but 
go back, under a kind of invincible awe, testifying— 
“never man spake like this man.” Afterward, to 
break some fancied spell there may be in him, they 
hire one of his own friends to betray him ; and even 
then, when they come directly before him and hear 
him speak, they are in such tremor of apprehen- 
sion, lest he should suddenly annihilate them, that 
they reel incontinently backward and are pitched 
on the ground. Pilate trembles visibly before him, 
and the more because of his silence and his won- 
derful submission. And then, when the fatal deed 
ig done, what do we see but that the multitude, 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 63 


awed by some dread mystery in the person of the 
crucified, return home smiting on their breasts for 
anguish, in the sense of what their infatuated and 
guilty rage has done. 

The most conspicuous matter, therefore, in the 
history of Jesus, is, that what holds true, in all our 
experience of men, is inverted in him. Geran 
He grows sacred, peculiar, wonderful, of men reversed 
divine, as acquaintance reveals him. At hike 
first he is only a man, as the senses report him to 
be; knowledge, observation, familiarity, raise him 
into the God-man. He grows pure and perfect, 
more than mortal in wisdom, a being enveloped in 
sacred mystery, a friend to be loved in awe—dies 
into awe, and a sorrow that contains the element 
of worship! And exactly this appears in the his- 
tory, without any token of art, or even apparent 
consciousness that it does appear—appears because 
itis true. Probably no one of the evangelists ever 
so much as noticed this remarkable inversion of 
what holds good respecting men, in the life and 
character of Jesus. Is this character human, or is 
it plainly divine ? 





We have now sketched some of the principal dis- 
tinctions of the superhuman character of Jesus. « 
We have seen him unfolding as a flower, 
from the germ of a perfect youth; 
growing up to enter into great scenes and have his 


Recapitulation. 


64 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


part in great trials ; harmonious in all with himself 

and truth, a miracle of celestial beauty. He is a 
Lamb in innocence, a God in dignity ; revealing an 
impenitent but faultless piety, such as no mortal 
ever attempted, such as, to the highest of mortals, 
is inherently impossible. He advances the most 
extravagant pretensions, without any show of con- 
ceit, or even seeming fault of modesty. He suffers 
without affectation of composure and without re- 
straint of pride; suffers as no mortal sensibility 
can, and where, to mortal view, there was ne reason 
for pain at all; giving us not only an example of 
gentleness and patience in all the small trials of 
life, but revealing the depths even of the passive 
virtues of God, in his agony and the patience of his 
suffering love. He undertakes also a plan, universal 
in extent, perpetual in time ; viz., to unite all na- 
tions in a kingdom of righteousness under God ; 
laying his foundations in the hearts of the poor, as 
no great teacher had ever done before, and yet 
without creating ever a faction, or stirring one par- 
tisan feeling in his followers. In his teachings he 
is perfectly original, distinct from his age and from 
all ages; never warped by the expectation of his 
friends ; always in a balance of truth, swayed by 
no excesses, running to no oppositions or extremes; 
clear of all superstition, and equally clear of all lib- 
eralism ; presenting the highest doctrines in the 
lowest and simplest forms; establishing a pure, 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 65 


universal morality, never before established ; and, 
with all his intense devotion to the truth, never 
anxious, perceptibly, for the success of his doctrine. 
Finally, to sum up all in one, he grows more great 
and wise, and sacred, the more he is known—needs, 
in fact, to be known, to have his perfection seen. 
And this, we say, is Jesus, the Christ ; manifestly 
not human, not of our world—some being who has 
burst into it, and is not of it. Call him for the 
present, that “ Holy Thing,” and say, “by this we 
believe that thou camest from God.” 

Not to say that we are dissatisfied with this 
sketch, would be almost an irreverence of itself, to 
the subject of it. Who can satisfy himself with 
any thing that he can say of Jesus Christ? We have 
seen, how many pictures of the sacred person of 
Jesus, by the first masters; but not one, among 
them all, that did not rebuke the weakness which 
could dare attempt an impossible subject. So of 
the character of Jesus. It is necessary, for the holy 
interest of truth, that we should explore it, as we 
are best able; but what are human thoughts and 
human conceptions, on a subject that dwarfs all 
thought and immediately outgrows whatever is con- 
ceived. And yet, for the reason that we have failed, 
we seem also to have succeeded. For the more im- 
possible it is found to be, to grasp the character 
and set it forth, the more clearly it is seen to be 
above our range—a miracle and a mystery, 


66 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


Two questions now remain, which our argument 
requires to be answered. And the first is this—did 

BS Ae such character, as this we have 
being actually been tracing, actually exist? Admit- 
eri! ting that the character, whether it be 
fact or fiction, is such as we have seen it to be, two 
suppositions are open ; either that such a character 
actually lived, and was possible to be described, be- 
cause it furnished the matter of the picture, itself ; 
or else, that Jesus, being a merely human character 
as he lived, was adorned to set off in this manner, 
by the exaggerations of fancy, and fable, and wild 
tradition afterward. In the former alternative, we 
have the insuperable difficulty of believing, that any 
so perfect and glorious character was ever attained 
to by a mortal. If Christ was a merely natural 
man, then was he under all the conditions privative, 
as regards the security of his virtue, that we have 
discovered in man. He was a new-created being, 
as such to be perfected in a character of steadfast 
holiness, only by the experiment of evil and re- 
demption from it. We can believe any miracle, 
therefore, more easily than that Christ was a man, 
and yet a perfect character, such as here is given. 

Tn the latter alternative, we have four different 
writers, widely distinguished in their style and 
mental habit—inferior persons, all, as regards their 
accomplishments, and none of them remarkable for 
gifts of genius—contributing their parts, and co- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 67 


alescing thus in the representation of a character 
perfectly harmonious with itself, and, withal, a 
character whose ideal no poet had been able to cre- 
ate, no philosopher, by the profoundest effort of 
thought, to conceive and set forth to the world. 
What is more, these four writers are, by the suppo- 
sition, children all of credulity, retailing the absurd 
gossip and the fabulous stories of an age of marvels, 
and yet, by some accident, they are found to have 
conceived and sketched the only perfect character 
known to mankind. To believe this, requires a 
more credulous age than these writers ever saw. 
We fall back, then, upon our conclusion, and there 
we rest. Such was the real historic character of 
Jesus. Thus he lived ; the character is possible to 
be conceived, because it was actualized in a living 
example. The only solution is that which is given 
by Jesus himself, when he says—“ I came forth from 
the Father, and am come into the world.” 

The second question is this: whether this char- 
acter is to be conceived as an actually existing sin- 
less character in the world? Thatitis wyshea sin- 
I maintain, because the character can !* character? 
no otherwise be accounted for in its known excel- 
lences. How was it that a simple-minded peasant 
of Galilee, was able to put himself in advance, in this 
manner, of all human teaching and excellence ; un- 
folding a character so peculiar in its combinations, 
and so plainly impossible to any mere man of the 


68 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


race? Because his soul was filled with internal 
beauty and purity, having no spot, or stain, distort- 
ed by no obliquity of view or feeling, lapsing, 
therefore, into no eccentricity or deformity. We 
can make out no account of him so easy to believe, 
as that he was sinless; indeed, we can make no 
other account of him at all. He realized what are, 
humanly speaking, impossibilities ; for his soul was 
warped and weakened by no human infirmities, do- 
ing all in a way of ease and naturalness, just be- 
cause it is easy for clear waters to flow from a pure 
spring. To believe that Jesus got up these high 
conceptions artistically, and then acted them, in 
spite of the conscious disturbance of his internal 
harmony, and the conscious clouding of his internal 
purity by sin, would involve a degree of credulity 
and a want of perception, as regards the laws of the 
soul and their necessary action under sin, so la- 
mentable as to be a proper subject of pity. We 
could sooner believe all the fables of the Talmud. 
Besides, if Jesus was a sinner, he was conscious 
of sin as all sinners are, and, therefore, was a hypo- 
crite in the whole fabric of his character ; realizing 
so much of divine beauty in it, maintaining the 
show of such unfaltering harmony and celestial 
grace, and doing ail this with a mind confused and 
fouled by the affectations acted for true virtues! 
Such an example of successful hypocrisy would be 
itself the greatest miracle ever heard of in the world, 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 69 


Furthermore, if Jesus was a sinner, then he was, 
of course, a fallen being ; down under the bondage, 
distorted by the perversity of sin and its desolating 
effects, as men are. The root, therefore, of all his 
beauty is guilt. Evil has broken loose in him, he 
is held fast under evil. Bad thoughts are streaming 
through his soul in bad successions ; his tempers 
have lost their tune; his affections have been 
touched by leprosy ; remorse scowls upon his 
heart ; his views have lost their balance and con- 
tracted obliquity ; in a word, he is fallen. Is it 
then such a being, one who has been touched, in 
this manner, by the demon spell of evil—is it he 
that is unfolding such a character? 

What, then, do our critics in the school of natu- 
ralism say of this character of Christ? Of course 
they are obliged to say many handsome yy, pyres 
and almost saintly things of it. Mr. sstimate of him. 
Parker says of him, that “ He unites in himself the 
sublimest precepts and divinest practices, thus more 
than realizing the dream of prophets and sages ; 
rises free from all prejudice of his age, nation, or 
sect ; gives free range to the Spirit of God, in his 
breast ; sets aside the law, sacred and true—hon- 
ored as it was, its forms, its sacrifice, its temple, its 
priests ; puts away the doctors of the law, subtle, 
irrefragable, and pours out a doctrine beautiful as 
the light, sublime as Heaven, and true as God.” * 


* Discourses of Religion, p. 294. 


10 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


Again—as if to challenge for his doctrine, the dis- 
tinction of a really supernatural excellence—* Try 
him as we try other teachers. They deliver their 
word, find a few waiting for the consolation who 
accept the new tidings, follow the new method, and 
soon go beyond their teacher, though less mighty 
minds than he. Thouga humble men, we see what 
Socrates and Luther never saw. But eighteen cen- 
turies have passed since the Sun of humanity rose 
so high in Jesus ; what man, what sect has mastered 
his thought, comprehended his method, and so fully 
applied it to life.” * 
Mr. Hennel, who writes in a colder mood, but has, 
on the whole, produced the ablest of all the argu- 
Mr. Hennel’s Ments yet offered on this side, speaks 
etouate more cautiously. He says, “ Whilst no 
human character, in the history of the world, can be 
brought to mind, which, in proportion as it could 
be closely examined, did not present some defects, 
disqualifying it for being the emblem of moral per- 
fection, we can rest, with least check or sense of in- 
congruity, on the imperfectly known character of 
Jesus of Nazareth.” ¢ 
But the intimation here is, that the character is 
not perfect ; it is only one in which the sense of 
Faults perfection suffers “least check.” And 
charged. = where is the fault charged? Why, it is 
discovered that Jesus cursed a fig-tree, in which he 


* Discourses of Religion, p. 303. + Inquiry, p. 451. 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 71 


is seen to be both angry and unreasonable. He de- 
nounced the Pharisees in terms of bitter animosity. 
He also drove the money changers out of the tem- 
ple with a scourge of rods, in which he is even be- 
trayed into an act of physical violence. These and 
such like specks of fault are discovered, as they 
think, in the life of Jesus. So graceless in our con- 
ceit, have we of this age grown, that we can think 
it a point of scholarly dignity and reason, to spot 
the only perfect beauty that has ever graced our 
world, with such discovered blemishes as these! As 
if sin could ever need to be made out against a real 
sinner, in this small way of special pleading ; or as 
if it were ever the way of sin to err in single parti- 
cles or homeeopathic quantities of wrong! A more 
just sensibility would denounce this malignant style 
of criticism, as a heartless and really low-minded 
pleasure in letting down the honors of goodness. 

In justice to Mr. Parker, it must be admitted that 
he does not actually charge these points of history 
as faults, or blemishes in the character Bae 
of Jesus. And yet, in justice also, it posed and inti- 
must be added that he does compose a fis 
section under the heading—“ The Negative Side, or 
the Limitations of Jesus,”’—where these, with other 
like matters, are thrown in by insinuation, as possi- 
ble charges sometimes advanced by others. For 
himself, he alleges nothing positive, but that Jesus 
was under the popular delusion of his time, in re- 


72 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


spect to devils or demoniacal possessions, and that 
he was mistaken in some of his references to the 
Old Testament. What, now, is to be thought of 
such material, brought forward under such a head- 
ing, to flaw such a character! Is it sure that Christ 
was mistaken in his belief of the foul spirits? Is it 
certain that a sufficient mode of interpretation will 
not clear his references of mistake? And so, when 
it is suggested, at second hand, that his invective is 
too fierce against the Pharisees, is there no escape, 
but to acknowledge that, “ considering his youth, it 
was a venial error?” Or, if there be no charge but 
this, “ at all affecting the moral and religious char- 
acter of Jesus,” should not a just reverence to one 
whose life is so nearly faultless, constrain us to look 
for some more favorable construction, that takes the 
solitary blemish away? Is it true that invective is 
a necessary token of ill-nature? Are there no occa- 
sions where even holiness will be most forward in 
it? And when a single man stands out alone, fac- 
ing a whole living order and caste, that rule the 
time—oppressors of the poor, hypocrites and pre- 
tenders in religion, corrupters of all truth and faith, 
under the names of learning and religion—is the 
malediction, the woe, that he hurls against them, to 
be taken as a fault of violence and unregulated pas- 
sion ; or considering what amount of force and 
public influence he dares to confront and set in 
deadly enmity against his person, is he rather to be 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 73 


accepted as God’s champion, in the honors of a 
great and genuinely heroic spirit ? 

Considering how fond the world is of invective, 
how ready to admire the rhetoric of sharp words, 
how many speakers study to excel in red Ae 
the fine art of excoriation, how many against the Pha: 
reformers are applauded in vehement “~~ 
attacks on character, and win a great repute of 
fearlessness, just because of their severity, when, in 
fact, there is nothing to fear—when possibly the 
subject is a dead man, not yet buried—it is really a 
most striking tribute to the more than human char- 
acter of Jesus, that we are found to be so appre- 
hensive respecting him in particular, lest his plain, 
unstudied, unrhetorical severities on this or that 
occasion, may imply some possible defect, or “ venial 
error,’ in him. Why this special sensibility to fault 
in him? save that, by his beautiful and perfect life, 
he has raised our conceptions so high as to make, 
what we might applaud in a man, a possible blemish 
in his divine excellence ? 

The glorious old reformer and blind poet of Puri- 
tanism—vindicator of a free commonwealth and a 
free, unprelatical religion—holds, in our  ygijton’s right 
view, a far worthier and manlier con- ° i*vective. 
ception of Christ’s dealing with the Pharisees, and 
of what is due to all the usurpations of titled con- 
ceit and oppression in the world. With truly re- 
freshing vehemence, he writes—“ For in times of 


74 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


opposition, when against new heresies arising, or 
old corruptions to be reformed, this cool, impassion- 
ate mildness of positive wisdom, is not enough to 
damp and astonish the proud resistance of carnal 
and false doctors, then (that I may have leave to 
soar awhile, as the poets use,) Zeal, whose substance 
is ethereal, arming in complete diamond, ascends 
his fiery chariot, drawn by two blazing meteors fig- 
ured like beasts, but of a higher breed than any the 
zodiac yields, resembling those four which Ezekiel 
and St. John saw—the one visaged lke a lion, to 
express power, high authority, and indignation ; the 
other of man, to cast derision and scorn upon per- 
verse and fraudulent seducers—with them the in- 
vincible warrior, Zeal, shaking loosely the slack 
reins, drives over the heads of scarlet prelates and 
such as are insolent to maintain traditions, bruising 
their stiff necks under his flaming wheels. Thus 
did the true prophets of old combat with the false ; 
thus Christ, himself the fountain of meekness, found 
acrimony enough to be still galling and vexing the 
prelatical Pharisees. But ye will say, these had im- 
mediate warrant from God to be thus bitter ; and I 
say, so much the plainer is it found that there may 
be a sanctified bitterness against the enemies of the 
truth.” * 

Probably Christ himself had no other account to 
give of his conduct, on the occasion referred to; 


* Apology for Smectymnus, Sect. I. 


OHARACTER OF JESUS. 75 


and no other was needed, than that he felt a zeal 
within him (answering to Milton’s picture), which 
could not, must not be repressed. His disciples felt 
his terrible severity, and were going to be shocked 
by it, but they remembered the Scripture—<The 
zeal of thy house hath eaten me up.” After all, it 
was, when rightly viewed, the necessary outburst, 
only, of that indignant fire, which is kindled in the 
sweet bosom of innocence, by the insolence of hy- 
pocrisy and oppression. 

I conclude, then, (1.) that Christ actually lived, 
and bore the real character ascribed to him in the 
history. And (2.) that he was a sinless character. 
How far off is he now from any possible classifica- 
tion in the genus humanity! 





Here, then, is a being who has broken into the 
world, and is not of it; one who has come out from 
God, and is even an expression tous of ye fact of his 
the complete beauty of God—such ag ™it#lesimplied. 
he should be, if he actually was, what he is affirmed 
to be, the Eternal Word of the Father incarnate. 
Did he work miracles? This now is the question 
that waits for our decision—did he work miracles? 
By the supposition, he is superhuman. By the 
supposition, too, he is in the world as a miracle. 
Agreeing that the laws of nature will not be sus- 
pended, any more than they are by our own super- 
natural action, will they yet be so subordinated to 


76 OHARACTER OF JESUS. 


his power, as to permit the performance of signs 
and wonders, in which we may recognize a super- 
human force? Since he is shown to be a superhu- 
man being, manifestly nature will have a relation to 
him, under and by her own laws, such as accords 
with his superhuman quality, and it will be very 
singular if he does not do superhuman things ; nay, 
it is even philosophically incredible that he should 
not, and that without any breach upon the integrity 
of nature. Thus an organ is a certain instrument, 
curiously framed or adjusted in its parts, and pre- 
pared to yield itself to any force which touches the 
keys. An animal runs back and forth across the 
key-board, and produces a jarring, disagreeable 
jumble of sounds. Thereupon he begins to reason, 
and convinces himself that it is in the nature of the 
instrument to make such sounds, and no other. But 
a skilful player comes to the instrument, as a higher 
presence, endowed with a super-animal sense and 
skill. He strikes the keys, and all-melodious and 
heavenly sounds roll out upon the enchanted air. 
Will the animal now go on to reason that this is 
impossible, incredible, because it violates the nature 
of the instrument, and is contrary to his own expe- 
rience? Perhaps he may, and men may sometimes 
not be wiser than he. But the player himself, and 
all that can think it possible for him to do what the 
animal can not, will have no doubt that the music is 
made by the same laws that made the jargon. Just 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 37 


so Christ, to whose will or touch the mundane sys- 
tem is pliant as to ours, may be able to execute re- 
sults through its very laws subordinated to him, 
which to us are impossible. Nay, it would be itself 
a contradiction of all order and fit relation if he 
could not. To suppose that a being out of human- 
ity, will be shut up within all the limitations of hu- 
manity, is incredible, and contrary to reason. The 
very laws of nature themselves, having him present 
to them, as a new agent and higher first term, would 
require the development of new consequences and 
incidents, in the nature of wonders. Being a mira- 
cle himself, it would be the greatest of all miracles 
if he did not work miracles. 

Let it be further noted, that Christ is here on an 
errand high enough to justify his appearing, and 
also of a nature to exclude any suspicion 45, errand is 
that he is going to overthrow the order order itself. 
of God’s works. He declares that he has come out 
from God, to be a destroyer of sin, a regenerator of 
all things, a new moral creator of the world; thus 
to do a work that is, at once, the hope of all order, 
and the greatest of all miracles. He tells us, in- 
deed, that he is come to set up the kingdom of God, 
and fulfil the highest ends of the divine goodness in 
the creation of the world itself ; and the dignity of 
his work, certified by the dignity also of his character, 
sets all things in proportion, and commends him to 
our confidence in all the wonders he performs. 


78 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


Nor shall we apprehend in his miracles any dis- 
ruption of law ; for we shall see that he is executing 

No disruption that true system, above nature and 
of law orsystem. more comprehensive, which is itself the 
basis of all stability, and contains the real import of 
all things. Dwelling from eternity in this higher 
system himself, and having it centred in his person, 
wheeling and subordinating thus all physical instru- 
ments, as doubtless he may, to serve those better 
ends in which all order lies, it will not be in us, 
when he comes forth from the Father, on the 
Father’s errand, to forbid that he shall work in the 
prerogatives of the Father. Visibly not one of us, 
but a visitant who has come out from a realm of 
spiritual majesty, back of the sensuous orb on which 
our moth-eyes dwell as in congenial dimness and 
obscurity of light, what shall we think when we see 
diseases fly before him, and blindness letting fall 
the scales of obscured vision, and death retreating 
from its prey, but that the seeming disruption of 
our retributive state under sin, is made to let in 
mercy and order from above? For, if man has 
buried himself in sense, and married all sense to 
sin, which sin is itself the soul of all disorder, can 
it be to us a frightful thing that he lays his hand 
upon the perverted casualties, and says, “thou art 
made whole?” If the bad empire, the bitter un- 
nature of our sin, is somewhere touched by his 
healing power, must we apprehend some fatal shock 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 79 


of disorder? If, by his miraculous force, some 
crevice is made in the senses, to let in the light of 
heaven’s peace and order, must we tremble lest the 
scientific laws are shaken, and the scientific causes 
violated ?: Better is it to say—“ This beginning of 
miracles did Jesus make in Galilee, and manifested 
forth his glory, and we believe in him,” Glory 
breaks in through his incarnate person, to chase 
away the darkness. In him, peace and order de- 
scend to rebuild the realm below, they have main- 
tained above. Sin, the damned miracle and misery 
of the groaning creation, yields to the stronger mir- 
acle of Jesus and his works, and the great good 
minds of this and the upper worlds behold integrity 
and rest returning, and the peace of universal em- 
pire secure. Out of the disorder that was, rises 
order ; out of chaos, beauty. Amen! Alleluia! for 
the Lord God omnipotent reigneth! 

At the same time, it must not be overlooked, that 
the account which is made of the Christian mira- 
cles, by the critics who deny them, is ; 
itself impossible. It is that they are indie ae 
myths, or legendary tales, that grew age 
up out of the story-telling and marvelling habit of 
the disciples of Christ, within the first thirty years 
after their Master’s death. They were developed, 
in other words, in the lifetime of the eye-witnesses 
of Christ’s ministry, and recorded by eye-witnesses 
themselves. We are also required to believe that 


80 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


four common men are able to preserve such a char- 
acter as that of Christ, while loading down the his- 
tory thus, with so many mythical wonders that are 
the garb of their very grotesque and childish cre- 
dulity! By what accident, then, we are compelled 
to ask, was an age of myths and fables able to de- 
velop and set forth the only conception of a perfect 
character ever known in our world? Were these 
four mythological dreamers, believing their own 
dreams and all others beside, the men to produce 
the perfect character of Jesus, and a system of 
teachings that transcend all other teachings ever 
given to the race? If there be a greater miracle, 
or a tax on human credulity more severe, we know 
not where it is. Nothing is so difficult, all human 
literature testifies, as to draw a character, and keep 
it in its living proportions. How much more to 
draw a perfect character, and not discolor it fatally 
by marks from the imperfection of the biographer. 
How is it, then, that four humble men, in an age of 
marvels and Rabbinical exaggerations, have done 
it—done what none, not even the wisest and greatest 
of mankind, have ever been able to do? 
So far, even Mr. Parker concedes the right of my 
argument. “Measure,” he says, “the religious doc- 
Ae aS, trine of Jesus by that of the time and 
Mr. Parker con- place he lived in, or that of any time 
f and any place. Yes, by the doctrine of 
eternal truth. Consider what a work his words and 


» 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. cil 


deeds have wrought in the world. Remember that 
the greatest minds have seen no farther, and added 
nothing to the doctrine of religion ; that the richest 
hearts have felt no deeper, and added nothing to the 
sentiment of religion ; have set no loftier aim, no 
truer method than his, of perfect love to God and 
man. Measure him by the shadow he has cast into 
the world—no, by the light he has shed upon it. 
Shall we be told such a man never lived? the whole 
story isalie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never 
lived. But who did their wonders, and who thought 
their thought? It takes a Newton to forge a New- 
ton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? 
None but a Jesus.” * 

Exactly so. And yet, in the middle of the very 
paragraph from which these words are gleaned, Mr. 
Parker says, “ We can learn few facts about Jesus”; 
also, that in certain things—to wit, his miracles, we 
suppose—“ Hercules was his equal, and Vishnu his 
superior.” Few facts about Jesus! all the miracles 
recited of him, as destitute of credibility as the sto- 
ries of Hercules and Vishnu! And yet these evan- 
gelists, retailing so many absurd fictions and so much 
childish gossip, have been able to give us a doctrine 
upon which the world has never advanced, a charac- 
ter so deep that the richest hearts have felt nothing 
deeper, and added nothing to the sentiment of it. 
They have done, that is, the difficult thing, and 


* Life of Jesus, p. 363. 


82 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


broken down under the easy! preserved, in the life 
and discourses of Jesus, what exceeds all human 
philosophy, all mortal beauty, and yet have not been 
able to recite the simplest facts! Is it so that any 
intelligent critic will reason? 
Neither let it be objected that, since the miracles: 
have in themselves no moral quality, there is no ra- 
’ tional, or valuable, or even proper place 
The miracles ; i 
are in placeina for them in a gospel, considered as a 
a new-creating grace for the world. For 
it is a thing of no secondary importance for a sin- 
ner, down under sin, and held fast in its bitter terms 
of bondage, to see that God has entered into hig 
case with a force that is adequate. These mighty 
works of Jesus, which have been done and duly — 
certified, are fit expressions to us of the fact that he 
can do for us all that we want. Doubtless it is a 
great and difficult thing to regenerate a fallen na- 
ture ; no person, really awake to his miserable and 
dreadful bondage, ever thought otherwise. But he 
that touched the blind eyes and commanded the 
leprosy away, he that trod the sea, and raised the 
dead, and burst the bars of death himself, can tame 
the passions, sweeten the bitter affections, regener- 
ate the inbred diseases, and roll back all the storms 
of the mind. Assured in this manner by his mira- 
cles, they become arguments of trust, a storehouse 
of powerful images, that invigorate courage and 
stimulate hope. Broken as we are by our sorrow, 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 83 


cast down as we are by our guiltiness, ashamed, and 
weak, and ready to despair, we can yet venture a 
hope that our great soul-miracle may be done ; that, 
if we can but touch the hem of Christ’s garment, a 
virtue will go out of him to heal us. In all dark 
days and darker struggles of the mind, in all out- 
ward disasters, and amid all storms upon the sea of 
life, we can yet descry him treading the billows, and 
hear him saying, “It is I, be not afraid.” And lest 
we should believe the miracles faintly, for there is a 
busy infidel lurking always in our hearts to cheat us 
of our faith, when he cannot reason it away, the 
character of Jesus is ever shining with and through 
them, in clear self-evidence, leaving them never to 
stand as raw wonders only of might, but covering 
them with glory, as tokens of a heavenly love, and 
acts that only suit the proportions of his personal 
greatness and majesty. 

There are many in our day, as we know, who, 
without making any speculative point of the ob- 
jection we are discussing, have so far  yfiractes_ re- 
yielded to the current misbelief as to jected se & Je; 
profess, with a certain air of self-com- Mile. 
pliment, that they are quite content to accept the 
spirit of Jesus; and let the miracles go for what 
they are worth. Little figure will they make as 
Christians in that kind of gospel. They will not, 
in fact, receive the spirit of Jesus; for that, un- 
abridged, is itself the Grand Miracle of Christianity, 


84 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


about which all the others play as scintillations only 
of the central fire. Still less will they believe that 
Jesus can do any thing in them which their sin re- 
quires. They will only compliment his beauty, imi- 
tate or ape his ways in a feeble lifting of themselves, 
but that he can roll back the currents of nature, 
loosened by the disorders of sin, and raise them to 
a new birth in holiness, they will not believe. No 
such watery gospel of imitation, separated from 
grace, will have any living power in their life, or 
set them in any bond of unity with God. Nothing 
but to say—* Jesus of Nazareth, a man approved of 
God by miracles and signs which God did by him,” 
can draw the soul to faith, and open it to the power 
of a supernatural and new-creative mercy. 
We come back, then, to the self-evidencing su- 
perhuman character of Jesus, and there we rest. 
FHS He is the sun that holds all the minor 
the all-sulficient orbs of revelation to their places, and 
f pours a sovereign, self-evidencing light 
into all religious knowledge. We have been debat- 
ing much, and ranging over a wide field, in chase 
of the many phantoms of doubt and false argument, 
still we have not far to go for light, if only we could 
cease debating and sit down to see. It is no in- 
genious fetches of argument that we want; no ex- 
ternal testimony, gathered here and there from the 
records of past ages, suffices to end our doubts ; 
but it is the new sense opened in us by Jesus him- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 85 


self—a sense deeper than words and more immedi- 
ate than inference—of the miraculous grandeur of 
his life; a glorious agreement felt between his 
works and his person, such that his miracles them- 
selves are proved to us in our feeling, believed in 
by that inward testimony. On this inward testi- 
mony we are willing to stake every thing, even the 
life that now is, and that which is to come. If the 
miracles, if revelation itself, can not stand upon the 
superhuman character of Jesus, then let it fall. If 
that character does not contain all truth and cen- 
tralize all truth in itself, then let there be no truth. 
If there is any thing worthy of belief not found in 
this, we may well consent to live and die without 
it. Before this sovereign light, streaming out from 
God, the deep questions, and dark surmises, and 
doubts unresolved, which make a night so gloomy 
and terrible about us, hurry away to their native 
abyss. God, who commanded the light to shine out 
of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the 
light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face 
of Jesus Christ. This it is that has conquered the 
assaults of doubt and false learning in all past ages, 
and will in all ages to come. No argument against 
the sun will drive it from the sky. No mole-eyed 
skepticism, dazzled by its brightness, can turn away 
the shining it refuses to look upon. And they who 
long after God, will be ever turning their eyes thith- 
erward, and either with reason or without reason, or, 


86 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 


if need be, against manifold impediments of reason, 
will see and believe. 
<n 

But before we drop a theme like this, let us note 
more distinctly the immense significance to our 
religious feeling of this glorious advent of Jesus, 
and have our congratulations in it, This one per- 
fect character has come into our world, and lived in 
it; filling all the molds of action, all the terms of 
duty and love, with his own divine manners, works 
and charities. All the conditions of our life are 
raised thus, by the meaning he has shown to be in 
them, and the grace he has put upon them. The 
world itself is changed, and is no more the same 
that it was ; it has never been the same since Jesus 
left it. The air is charged with heavenly odors, and 
a kind of celestial consciousness, a sense of other 
worlds, is wafted on us in its breath. Let the dark 
ages come, let society roll backward and churches 
perish in whole regions of the earth, let infidelity 
deny, and, what is worse, let spurious piety dishonor 
the truth ; still there is a something here that was 
not, and a something that has immortality in it _ 
Still our confidence remains unshaken, that Christ 
and his all-quickening life are in the world, as fixed 
elements, and will be to the end of time ; for Chris- 
tianity is not so much the advent of a better doc- 
trine, as of a perfect character ; and how can a per- 


CHARACTER OF JESUS. 87 


fect character, once entered into life and history, be 
separated and finally expelled? It were easier to 
untwist all the beams of light in the sky, separating 
and expunging one of the colors, than to get the 
character of Jesus, which is the real gospel, out of 
the world, Look ye hither, meantime, all ye blinded 
and fallen of mankind, a better nature is among 
you, a pure heart, out of some pure world, is come 
into your prison and walks it with you. Do you 
require of us to show who he is, and definitely to 
expound his person? We may not beable. Enough 
to know that he is not of us—some strange being 
out of nature and above it, whose name is Wonder- 
ful. Enough that sin has never touched his hal- 
‘lowed nature, and that he is a friend. In him 
dawns a hope—purity has not come into the world, 
except to purify. Behold the Lamb of God, that 
taketh away the sins of the world! Light breaks 
in, peace settles on the air, lo! the prison walls are J 
giving way—rise, let us go. TJ 


THE END. 








AuG24 ‘AS 


BAY 21 59 


APR 1 ‘63 
Way IT 6a 


MAY 23 ‘67 


= 


Date Due 

















—_ 


Sch.R. 232.9 \BY7sc 247756 


SCHOOL OF RELIGION 


97200 


1 





